


Liminal Spaces

by thesubparpirate



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1st-person POV, Auror Harry, Depression, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, HP: EWE, Incorrect assumptions, M/M, PTSD, Partial stream-of-consciousnesses, Past Relationships, Potioneer Draco, Railroad Tracks, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, non-linear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:35:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22117231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesubparpirate/pseuds/thesubparpirate
Summary: There was a railroad. The tracks spanned first one distance, then another.Draco lived in his small village by the mountainside for many years. It was lonely, but it was quiet. He would not have selected it, but as far as prisons go, he could have done far worse.The company he came to hold, however, complicated his solitary lifestyle.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 8
Kudos: 27





	1. Hunger

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, my dear readers, for taking the time to read. This story took a long time to create and I appreciate your feedback. I mostly wrote this for myself, as a thinking piece, but also as something to be shared.
> 
> Sincerely,  
> X

“It’s been a while.”

“So it has.”

A lull in the conversation. They could hear their heartbeats, their breathing. 

“...What’s brought you back around here, then?”

“Memories,” one of them said, looking around. The station was crowded at this time of day, but they could find each other easily, even by happenstance. “To go back to that precipice that you never saw before. It’s...bittersweet. You know?”

A mother walked by with her child by the hand. 

An owl hooted in its cage atop a rolling cart, pushed by a gaggle of enthusiastic students. 

A man, here, who once was lost, has now returned. 

“Yeah. I know.”

  
  
  


**~HUNGER~**

I have been fasting for two days. This is no easy task when you live on a farm. 

I have felt lightheaded often, and earlier today I had to rest for a moment in the middle of picking tomatoes. My head aches when I’m not distracted. My stomach roils, but I believe that is because I’ve allowed myself a number of black coffees to keep me focused. I cannot admit that I may be anxious about the outcomes of my research.

Hunger is supposed to increase mental acumen. So far, I have not encountered these effects. I have experienced no much-needed epiphanies and no breakthroughs. My lab remains neat and barren as ever, devoid of solutions. 

I must figure out this conundrum. 

My subject has discovered and does not approve of my fasting. I have elected to spend the night away from the farm, and have set up tent in the mountain a fair bit away in the hopes that isolation will provide me the answers I need. 

The constellations that hang in this sky are different from those back home. The Draco constellation is slightly off compared to where it is in England, dimly lit tonight in the inky blackness. The origins of my name drifts across my consciousness. If only I lived up to it’s legend. I’m not sure which substitute would be more fitting for me. Certainly nothing heroic, and that’s all that seems to be written in the stars. If there was a constellation for bookish, isolative potioneers, perhaps then I could find myself there. 

As mother used to say, I worry far too much. I may never get the creases out from the corners of my mouth and beside my eyes at this rate. 

My subject’s state has still not ameliorated. I have tried everything I can think of. The creams I’ve produced seem to have no effect: all the tinctures and salves have not changed a thing. I have adjusted the dosages of my ingredients and the quantity as well as quality of certain things, but my work is to no avail. He is as obstinate as ever: maybe it is a psychological issue, as well as a physiological one. If only he had begun as a less bull-headed individual, perhaps then he would be seeing results. 

In addition to fasting, I have forced myself to stop looking at my journal. I believe my notes may be biasing my current opinion, and it is obvious that all of my previous trials failed spectacularly. I must clear my head. 

My subject, with his continued state, presents my failures to me as proof that my efforts are useless. He persists in his myriad explanations of rationality, but of course, every insane man believes himself to be the sanest of all. I understand that for each person, reality is just slightly skewed: his, however, is so horrendously off-kilter, all helter-skelter with limbs akimbo, awkward angles and strange proclamations, that his vision has obviously been altered.

I must understand how to undo the ways in which I have maligned his life. I owe him a duty: I owe him much more, in fact. I owe him my life, and if I must, I will devote my life to his. 

I’m thankful when Orion emerges from the underbrush to curl up beside me. His warmth, albeit small, means the difference between a sleepless night and a restful one. 

  
  


Much as I adore Shelley, I can at the very least comfort myself in that I am no Victor Frankenstein. I didn’t create my monster out of hubris, or recklessness, or arrogance: my monster, or at least the one I battle presently, exists from no concerted effort on my part. Spontaneous generation, defying the laws of science as we know it. 

But then, magic always does.

My monster is not a living being. It is a feeling, a deep sense of knowledge, which my subject experiences and that I have somehow produced in him. My monster is myself and what I can do to others. I must discover a way to restrain it. 

And if I am being honest, it haunts me most because, in my weaker moments, I fantasize what it would be like if I simply let the monster be.

I return to the cottage early the next morning. Orion accompanies me to the door, but, as always, refuses to enter. A real Jack London type. No matter--a bowl of chicken is left out for him, whether or not he embraces the ball and chain that is the collar and warm hearth of domestication.

My subject is a late riser: he does not  _ do  _ mornings, not when he can help it. This means I can avoid him and the conflict he will inevitably bring, and instead fix myself a coffee, dark and muddy, before I head downstairs to my lab. 

A few more hours and I will have the focus to discover that which has eluded me for so long. I know it.

~*~

My subject still remains ignorant of my more targeted experiments. He believes that my lab exists for the sole purpose of my business. Before he came to live here, that assumption was correct. 

Today I am preparing one of my usuals in stock to take my mind off my dilemma. If I can sneak up on the issue, catch it on unawares, maybe my subconscious mind will latch onto the right solution. I’ve been ignoring my profession in lieu of more pressing matters recently besides, and my spending money is running low. I need to restock on some of my rarer items, and I’d like to pay for them as well as my groceries without skimping.

I’m brewing a cream made with rose and honey, both sourced from my farm. I didn’t mean to become a beekeeper in addition to all of my other responsibilities, but when one of my neighbors passed away and his hives were left unattended, I couldn’t resist. Honey and honeycomb has so many properties integral to potioneering that sourcing my own has cut down my shipment costs exponentially. And, from a purely personal standpoint, I love the taste of it in my tea. 

What with the reliably unpredictable presence of Orion, the neighbor’s untimely death at the young age of ninety-one, my speaking of foreign tongues (and I’ve taken care not to speak magic in the villagers presence!) and general isolation--I’ve been setting myself up for superstition basically since I arrived. 

Well, I do love a good rumor. Especially when it’s true. 

I am considering the implications of sporting an Evil Eye ear stud around the village when I hear the creaks in the floorboards upstairs. The man of the hour, the day, the week, the year-- he awakens.

My subject is allowed access to my lab only when I’m in his presence. For all our disagreements, he concedes this to me. I’ve impressed upon him the volatile nature of some of the ingredients I keep in stock, and even he isn’t so foolhardy to mess with them. Not that he would, unless he was looking for something suspicious--he hates potions. He wouldn’t even know where to start. 

I know, because a few months ago,while I was focused on raising a brew to boil and wasn’t paying attention, he was poking around lifting glasses and peering myopically into them as he’s wont to do. One jar wasn’t as robust as he’d assumed, the contents more caustic than I imagined in storage. The lid broke off in his hands and startled me from focus by a soft swear from Harry’s lips and the clatter of fallen glass. 

A smoky, woodsy aroma from the jar filled the lab, and though it wasn’t an unpleasant smell, it was a frightening one for me. I abandoned my bubbling cauldrons, the fire extinguished with a jerky wave of my hurried hand, and walked as fast as I would allow myself to go to him.

“Over here,” I said urgently, tugging on his shirtsleeve. “Come, come on now. This way. Here, Harry. Right here. Stand there.” 

He knew something dangerous had happened, but hadn’t completely understood until I used his first name. I’d been able to corral my emotions and keep them from my manners and movements, but that simple slip of the tongue and the thoughtless use of his first name that I’d never employed before made him move like a jolt of electricity had been shot through him. 

Once he stood where I directed, I created a containment spell and pulled a lever. Immediately, his face, hair, and clothes were covered in a torrent of white. It did not stop for a long few moments, and as it worked, I Banished the broken jar and it’s contents. 

The shower finished, I removed the containment and dispelled the liquid. I asked him if he thought he’d been cut by the glass shards, and even though he said no, I thoroughly inspected his hands both by magic and my own eyesight and took a diagnostic of him. 

“What was that?” he asked me, taking off his glasses and meticulously spelling them cleaner than I had. There was no reluctance in his voice to know, as mine would have, but there was a small kernel of fear. As always, he is and was far braver than I am.

“It was a reduction of casca bark,” I explained. “Usually, casca bark has to be ingested to be deadly, but it’s reactions when comes in contact with the blood stream can vary. You appear to be fine, though, so I’ll simply have to keep an eye on you for the rest of the day,” I reassured him, giving him a wan smile. I refrained from mentioning that in its native habitat of the Congo, casca bark is commonly referred to as “doom bark”.

“Oh…” he said, warily looking at his hands, still holding them away from his body. “What did you pour on me?”

“Milk,” I grinned. He cocked his head and made a face quite like he was trying to ward off a sneeze. I had to laugh. 

“Mixed with other ingredients, that is. Honey as one--your skin will be wonderfully soft. But milk is the primary thing. It’s a simple product, but an effective neutralizer,” I explained. “The enzymes in it can break down spice, which I’m sure you’re aware of. But it also has strong qualities in combating magic. Did you know milk with honey is the preferred sustenance of the Aos Sí, the Sidhe?” 

“The who?” 

I come across as snide and haughty even now, when I no longer mean to. I forget that not everyone has been raised with a pureblood education, and that most magic folk nowadays know quite little about our more-than-humble beginnings. 

Harry’s sneeze expression had only deepened, but he knew me well enough by then to read that I hadn’t meant to rub my knowledge and his ignorance in his face. 

“The fae.” I waved my hand and shrugged, rather uncomfortable for having brought up the subject now that I found myself explaining it. “They drink honey milk because they need a cleansing substance, as such powerful magical beings. And in turn, it’s said that if milk is used for a similar purpose amongst wizards, we may have their blessing. Best not to talk about them too much, though: if you don’t know them, you’re probably better for it.”

“Why?”

“They can be…wily,” I replied cautiously, shaking out my hair for some way to fidget. Talking about them made me nervous, especially on the farm, so deep in the wilderness. They are so easily offended, and they come when they’re called, or so our legends say. I certainly did not want to welcome any unexpected guests that night. “Sorry, Potter, but that’s all I can give you. Now, if you insist upon staying in my lab, can I ask you to go over to that seat and not get up from it until I’ve finished?”

Unusually cowed, he did as I asked. And that was that--crisis averted. 

All in all, he is not as horrible a housemate as I dreaded initially. He keeps things clean and does not make too much of a ruckus, which is surprising. As I took it, havoc and chaos simply seemed to follow him, ever the unwitting victim, everywhere. 

Today he has joined me, sitting on the stool I brought down specifically for him after the day of the accident, watching me refine my ingredients. He is picking at the skin by his nails again— I can tell by the noise it makes— so I take a jar of hand cream off the shelf and hand it to him. I have many more that will get shipped off before the week’s end. 

He accepts the jar wordlessly, half distracted. He gestures to the table, every surface covered in bubbling cauldrons and chopping boards. “How did you know this was what you wanted to do?” he asks suddenly.

I shrug, walking back to the table. “It wasn’t so much that I knew what I wanted—there are a lot of different things I want, from a lazy perspective. I want to go deep sea diving. I’d like to walk on another planet. I want to be a classic author, an explorer, a political leader…and on and on. But what do I have the motivation to really sit down and do? What works with the resources I have, with the time at my disposal, and with my skill set?” I shrug again. “That narrowed down my options. And then I could make a decision, which lead to another, and yet another.”

“I always pictured you…” he drifts off and fiddles with the label on the jar, peeling it off slowly in thin strips. He still hasn’t opened it. 

“Like my father?”

He looks at me, twisting the paper between his fingers. He is always moving. “Yes.”

I huff a soft chuckle and return to the cutting board. “You and me both.”


	2. Cherries

“How have things been? How have...I haven’t heard much of you.”

The bustle and light of King’s Cross on a bright September afternoon faded away. All that was left are a few quiet sentences, a few deep breaths. Measured gazes and hesitant gestures. 

“The business is getting by. Well. More than getting by.”

“You were always talented at whatever you set your mind to.” 

He was graced with a small smile. One he was hoping for, and hated himself just a bit for it.

“I know.”

~ **CHERRIES** ~

The last salve I concocted made me break out in hives all over my arms, chest, and neck. I believe it may have been the Boomslang skin that did it. I will have to adjust the recipe: I’d thought I was close. I might still be, if not for how horrendously sensitive my skin is. I am proud of my looks, but I wish they had come with a touch more physical fortitude. At least I have filled out somewhat from all my time spent at work on the farm.

In any case, I am becoming more and more suspicious that I am only treating the symptom, and not the cause. If I can create a potion to be ingested, rather than a topical cream, that may stop whatever hormones are producing my undesirable affect. A suppressant. How...distasteful. 

There are certain suppressants already available, but they act with the broad strokes of a drunken painter, and I need surgical precision. They were obviously not crafted by a master potioneer. But then, despite Granger’s dogged pursuit of civil rights, spearheading the past few motions for equality in governance and healthcare, the representation for non-witches and wizards remains dismal as ever on a daily basis.

I have been studying their recipes, trying to walk backwards how they were created, to understand how they may be better improved upon and specified. It has been difficult to do, but I cannot risk contacting mass manufacturers. It would not put my mind at ease, to know more people than necessary know of my unfortunate predicament. Such and much more is the isolation of secret-keeping, which I had hoped to be done with long ago. 

It’s slow going, this backwards dance. I’ve done many experiments and none have come out exactly right. I’ve concluded that elderberry juice is a main component, though I can’t imagine why. It’s not as though I’m in need of antioxidants, and besides that raw elderberry is poisonous and consumption can lead to convulsions, so I must be very sparing with its quantity unless I boil it off. They must have some sort of reactant quality to the other ingredients--it is far too risky an additive otherwise. Powdered antler of a jackelope, or some in-between creature such as that. 

I sigh and scratch at my hair, still unused to the ungainly little bun it makes. 

My subject noticed my failed experiment today. It was difficult not to, covered from the waist up in salve and bandages as I emerged from the lab. He didn’t ask what I’d done to myself this time. By now, it’s all fairly routine. He just shook his head and tutted. 

He’s in the kitchen making dinner. Some sort of curry. Oh, he is a good cook. The smell of it makes my mouth water and turns my sour stomach. I drank too much coffee today, again, like always. My vices getting the best of me. My chest feels tight with rapid breaths and my head rather floaty. My eyes don’t seem to want to close, and everything in me is buzzing. It is not an entirely unwelcome sensation, but I don’t think it’s brought me any closer to a breakthrough. 

  
  


“Sit for supper,” he said. I shook my head.

“Only a few more hours and I’ll crack it,” I said. But I know I sounded unconvincing. I certainly looked unconvincing. 

“ _ Draco _ ,” he sighed, giving me an exasperated once-over. “Sit down. The only thing you’ll crack in a few hours is your head when you pass out. Eat. You can start again later.”

He saw me hesitate and it was over. I let him lead me to the table, because we both knew he had won. He made my favorite yellow curry tonight, with bamboo shoots and chicken and sweet coconut rice. He spooned it onto a plate before the pots were off the stove and spelled it over to me. He fixed his own afterwards. 

I’m not sure who taught him to cook the way he does. Molly, most likely, though I’ve never seen her make an Asian dish. She might have taught him the meat-and-potato basics, and then it would have been well within his abilities to run with it. He was always a quick study with subjects that interested him. 

Still, I can’t help but feel that I’m letting him down. I am dulling myself when I need my mind to be sharp. We’ve lived too long this way—it’s been ages. He has already afforded me too much time here.

“Eat,” he repeated, and this time was different. He didn’t say it with authority. He didn’t make it a command. There was something in his expression I couldn’t place, a type of emotion one doesn’t usually observe on a face like his. Something softer than his usual brashness. 

I picked up the spoon, and all was lost. 

I grow not only the plants I need for my potions in my farm. I also grow what we eat. 

We always had fresh food at the manor before hard times hit, and I always felt better after a meal with it. My mother taught me the importance of eating well for ourselves—how it can show one’s love, making sure you and those you care about have good, healthy food. There is no small amount of pride I garner from knowing that I have made a life that is sustainable on my own.

That, and, well. After the war, things were difficult. I didn’t lack for money, but many people did not appreciate my involvement in the fighting, what little they knew of it. I was sent away shortly after the bloodshed ended, but that did not stop someone from attempting to poison me upon the war’s end. I have learned not to trust a good many others and to depend on their ignorance. I have my potential assassins in part to thank for the extensive knowledge of plants, poisons, and remedies I now possess.

Harry was surprised when he discovered this. Stumbling into my abode, he’d thought that my small cottage must have had an expansion charm concealed within it and a legion of House Elves attuned to my every whim. Little does he know, seeing the small creatures makes me a bit nauseous, now. I don’t like to think of them: it brings back too many memories of my former life, and of the person I once was. 

For all my skill with potions, I dislike cooking. If I’m hungry, I’ll eat an apple, or some figs, or even on many occasions a particularly large tomato - the ones around here are called ‘elephant hearts’ in the local language, and for good reason. I figured my subpar attempts at creating sustenance could only ruin what nature has already provided for me. If it takes more than thirty seconds to slice up or peel, I’m disinterested in it. I do enough of that for my job.

He isn’t like that. If my potioneering is a science, his cooking is art. He does it the muggle way—he says it’s more relaxing that way, though I can’t agree. He knows my kitchen better than I do and he moves through it with fluid confidence, step like a dance I was too unmotivated to learn. I like to listen to the sounds of him making things while I write up my notes, or research, or re-read my own journal. Sometimes he hums while he works or sings softly to songs I don’t know. It’s tuneless and low, but the sound of it hypnotizes and calms me. 

He is dependable, and dependably good, and both of those things are a gift. 

He used to watch me in the garden every now and then when he first came to live here, but I remember the first time he truly took an interest. It was early June, and the trees were heavy with dark cherries. 

“Can I help?” he asked, squinting at me, one hand lifted to his eyes and his face screwed up against the beaming summer sun. I pushed my fringe from my sweaty forehead with a forearm, my gloved hands full of fruit and bark and grime, and jerked my chin to one of many buckets put at my side.

“Fill that with the darkest cherries you can find,” I told him. “That tree, there, to your left. That one is ready.” 

He pulled out his wand, but I stopped him. “I need the wood for potions making. If we strip the trees with magic, it will leave a residue and disrupt my work.”

I tensed myself for argument, but there was none. He simply nodded, half-smiled an “Alright,” and picked up a bucket. 

We worked side by side for a few hours, filling buckets and trimming branches. Finally satisfied with our work, I sat down with my gloves thrown between my feet, and waved over two tall glasses of what to the health-conscious person would have been water, but what was actually beer.

“Do you do this with all the produce in your garden?” he asked as we drank. 

“Yes,” I replied, casting an  _ Aguamenti  _ and wetting my hands, rubbing dirt from my forearms. I raked my fingernails through my hair, the cold water refreshing in the midday heat. A cleaning charm would only dry out my skin, and we had more work to do. “Most of my plants serve some sort of dual purpose for my potions as well as for myself. All the more dangerous potions ingredients—I have a few which can be quite toxic without sufficient preparation, some mushrooms that aren’t edible, false berries, and what have you—those are away in the greenhouse on the edge of my property, away from the others. I’ve cast wards and planted cordgrass and nettles, so that should scare off anyone or thing who might wander over. But, no matter what, I try to handle my plants with more care than magic generally affords.”

He hummed and didn’t comment much. But when I sneaked a glance at him, his face and arms flush from the heat and already beginning to tan, he seemed to be gazing at my farm with something very close to admiration.

I turned away before he noticed how pleased I was. 

My subject has been helpful, but he has derailed our progress as well, and in nothing as small as a well-made meal. He does not see what he does as distractions and instead tells me that the times he forces me from the lab are simply well-needed respite. But he doesn’t understand that I feel like I’m failing him every day I let him labor under the misconceptions his situation has burdened him with. It’s quite a personal emotion, and one I don’t know how to describe and wouldn’t feel comfortable doing anyhow, so I hold my tongue and let him do what he thinks best every once in a very great while. 

One day he took us into the mountains and he didn’t let me bring the pouch I use for my collections. That day wasn’t for potions, he told me. I sported sunglasses, a cap, and my worn-out overalls. He wore a plaid shirt, dark green, blue, and black, his backpack slung over one shoulder. Our boots sank into the dead leaves left over from last fall. The air was awash with that sharp smell of springtime. Birds and small creatures moved in the foliage overhead, their tiny, swift movements disrupting the splotchy green shadows cast on the ground. He caught me when I tripped over a hidden log and held me up while I struggled to regain my balance in the leaf refuse. 

We sat together in a flat, shady, grassy divot halfway up. The mountains and flatlands stretched out before us, the fields blooming in pinks and whites in ordered lines, the hills blanketed in dense trees. He had brought a thermos of tea and jam sandwiches. I sat cross-legged on the ground and listened to him talk while I ate, licking marmalade from my fingers and balling up napkins. His shoulders were relaxed and the lines fell from his face, his mouth curving into an easy smile that he hadn’t worn in years, one that I’d begun to see with increasing frequency directed at me. 

The mountain was painted in greens, blues, and pinks beneath us, and I still remember that day, that view, whenever I trek far enough.

Another day, he dragged me from the underground darkness of my lab after an extended flurry of experiments like exhuming a dead man from his grave. I blinked like a newborn in the summer sun and barely caught the broom when he tossed it to me.

“Today’s the day, no excuses!” he grinned at me, and, in spite of myself, his excitement was infections. “C’mon!”

The mountains were even more beautiful from the sky. I watched him dip and soar like birds did, and allowed myself to be cajoled into racing, up and down, around the forested peaks. The wind brought tears to my eyes and a flush to my stinging cheeks, but my mouth hurt from grinning, and in my weaker moments I revisit how he raised his hands from the broom handle and whooped, laughing, triumphant, at the sky. 

I was happy that he was happy, but it was a contentment that was tinged, on the barest edges of it, by melancholy. How could I trust that he meant what he was doing, and he wasn’t just disrupted by my affliction?

How can I trust anything that he does, really, when we live like this? I don’t want to be his jailer. He must have the free sort of life he has fought so hard for. Whether or not that includes me has yet to be seen, and I can afford myself no hold over him.

It’s why I must work so hard now. 


	3. Black Coffee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys. To those of you reading, a tw here - nothing is graphic, and everything is purposefully vague. But a character is in a situation where they feel violated and uncomfortable after a sexual encounter.
> 
> Also to note, as we delve into the plot (which, at this point, moves back and forth in time) we see Draco shortly with someone who is not Harry. I didn’t include it in the tags because although it is something that psychologically affects our main man, that relationship itself does not spiral into the rapport between Draco and Harry.

“I’ve heard a bit about you, you know. Scaring off young Teddy’s love interests.”

“Who told you?”

“Luna.”

“Ah, well. That wasn’t so much scaring off anyone except her parents at a Hogwarts fundraiser.”

“It’s good to know he’s being well taken care of.”

“You should come by sometime. He would like to see you.” 

“I would like that.”

A charged pause. 

A small swallow. 

Just a tad bit of nerves. 

A repetition. “Yeah. He would like to see you.”

~ **BLACK COFFEE~**

I try not to think too much about the dark days, but they get to me sometimes. They’re devious and conniving, and when they come, they attack me in different ways.

Sometimes, to avoid them, I throw myself even more into my work than usual. Sometimes I forget to sleep or refuse to eat. Maybe it is because I believe that if I can work a little harder, figure out this one specific potion for a client, understand this or that theory a bit better, test this hypothesis  _ one more _ time to make sure I get the result I expect-- maybe if I do enough of everything, maybe then I can make it up to those I have lost for remaining here. 

I don’t like thinking like that. I don’t like thinking that I need an excuse to exist. It’s something that plagues Harry, too, that doubt, and I tell him,  _ you don’t need a reason to exist. You simply do. _

I can say it to him easily and immediately, but I don’t believe it for myself. 

I have caused so much destruction. I know the Order needed me, and they employed me in a way that matched my strengths and in a job I could fulfill, but on the bad days I wonder if I should have. I wonder if I could have done better, if only I was braver, more selfless. 

Would it have made a difference if I took a stand like my more courageous current housemate? If I had dared to openly defy the Dark Lord, and somehow managed not to get myself and everyone I loved killed? Or would it have been better to meekly support him, a lamb to the slaughter, submit the way I pretended to and leave none of my mind closed to him?

I don’t think I could have done better in my role. It required lying to myself, believing my lies and forgetting they were not true but only some of the time. It was a difficult and dangerous game to play, and if my methods were flawed, I knew the risks going into it. I just didn’t believe them. 

On these bad days, I think about the people who died because of me, the people I tortured, the people who suffered because of my passivity as I prioritized the information I could gain over their safety and their lives. I think about Charity Burbage. I think about Vince.

I think about Pansy most of all. The grief that her absence has left me with is a living thing, a shadow that dogs me wherever I go and strikes when I am weakest, and I am helpless to fight it off. I do not want to fight it off. I want to soak in it, wallow in it until it seeps into the marrow of my bones, because in carrying that sorrow with me I will at least have kept a part of her alive.

I try to distract myself from it, when I can and when I must. I throw my work at it like a bone to a dog for it to gnaw on, and the more work I have the more I can pretend I don’t hear my defenses splintering in its slavering jaws. 

The days I think about my parents are the darkest of all. Those days leave me exhausted and mentally frayed. They make me question why I am currently working so hard to find a solution. If I succeed, my victory will be my punishment. Shadows with their voices whisper that I will be left again because I am unlovable. 

I am, inherently, too difficult to live with. It wasn’t something ever said directly to me, but it is something I have come to know regardless. 

I push everyone away eventually with the force of my unlikeable personality, my introversion, my relentless self-centeredness and my proclivity towards melancholy. It would be better to leave things as they are and to know that I have an ingenuine partner for the future, and never mind however compelled he is by forces other than his own affection. 

_ The only way you will get anyone to love you is by force, because you forced everyone else to abandon you _ .

I try very hard not to think about them and the rift that has been caused by the force of my betrayal towards them. Because when I do, everything becomes monumentally more difficult for me. Getting out of bed is a colossal achievement, as is taking a shower and brushing my teeth. 

For one stretch of time, not too long before my subject came to live with me, I did not shower for over a week. I was filthy and wretched and had the beginnings of gum disease and my hair was a nearly unsalvageable wreck from sleeping instead of getting out of bed and having nothing fresh to eat, which made me feel even more wretched and filthy. Towards the end I began denying myself the pleasure of cleanliness as a form of self-flagellation, though knowing that did not help better myself. 

I was a disappointment, a failure of a human being and yet for some profoundly flawed calculations done by the universe I still live while others don’t. It was only right that my outside appearance reflected the shame of my existence. I did not leave the cottage that whole week, nor the ones before or after.

Shame is a wolf, and it treads on tireless paws and hunts forever.

I am an early riser by nature, so Harry notices when he wakes up and I’m not experimenting in my lab or doddering about in the garden or scribbling in my journal at the kitchen table. From behind my closed door, I can hear him in the kitchen. The smell of browning egg bread and coffee fills the house, though he prefers tea. He knocks on my door, and I grunt in return. I’ve been awake for hours, staring at the wall, remembering all the ways I’ve ruined my parents’ lives and how they’ve ruined mine and trying not to think about it, but he doesn’t need to know that. He already knows that.

When I sit down at the table with bloodshot, bag-laden eyes, he greets me with a mug of muddy, strong coffee and a stacked plate of egg bread with the blueberry jam I made the year before, my favorite and he knows it. We sit and I stare between my plate and an open book that I’ve carried with me like a soldier with his shield, taking small bites of breakfast and painfully aware of the work that chewing and swallowing is. He reads The Quibbler and sips the coffee he hates, wrinkling his nose and adding more milk to dilute the taste but contented to continue doing so anyway. 

“Why do you drink it if you don’t like it?” I asked him one day, watching him absentmindedly wrinkle his nose for the third or fourth time. “I don’t have cream, but I have sugar you could put in it.” 

He looked up from the paper and shrugged, making a face. “I like trying it,” he said. “You like it, so. I figured I’d try it. Maybe someday I’ll grow to enjoy it.”

I hummed, unsure of what else to say, and turned away. 

I wonder often how he manages to remain happy. 

I don’t think I had such a depressive affect as a child. But I know, from my experiences I the war, from my experiences with him, from what I’ve heard, that he did not lack for struggle growing up. I never afforded him the credit he deserved back then. At least, when I was small, I knew with all the ease of breathing that my parents loved me. No matter how deeply flawed my parents were and are, no matter how strained and embittered our relationship is now, I can say with absolute confidence that, at least at one time, I was loved. 

He can’t say that. Not unless that first year of life is to be counted, the one that everyone but he himself can recall. In its stead he has an overwhelming slough of vicious memories, of frustration and hunger and gritted teeth.

And then swift at its heels our school years followed all his turbulence, and then the war. I’m not sure how he manages it. I’m good with potions, but not people. And he is the most baffling person I have ever met. 

He’s happy. Miraculously, he’s happy. He smiles often. He whistles while he picks peppers and cucumbers. He hums while he chops carrots and cuts up potatoes. He’s curious about my work, he goes on runs, he hikes through the mountains, and he never seems to run out of energy. And the few times he’s been under the weather or when the nightmares have kept him awake and the ghosts of his past have haunted him all night, he needs little more than a mug of something hot, a gentle pat on the arm, and a good distraction to return to his normal self. 

The only time this didn’t work, I remember, was one hazy summer night in the middle of July. My cooling charms had been on full blast, but even so he woke up bolt upright, covered in sweat. 

He had sought me out in the small hours of the night, down in the basement lab consumed in another project that absorbed all my hours and made the minutes skitter by. He stood in the stairway, watching me as he shivered, too proud to distract me from my work. I’m not sure how long he was there; he was quiet. His face was serious, the lines in bold around his mouth and his eyes hard and quietly desperate. 

When I noticed him, finally, he startled me so profoundly that I dropped the vial I’d been carrying. Nothing important, luckily. But I’d never dropped anything before in my lab.

“Harry?”

He was still for a long moment, unmoving, not speaking. His face was shadowed in the dim light of the stairwell, and I could not begin to imagine what he was thinking of. 

But then, a step. Soft and padded in his socked feet. “Can I…?” he began, his sentence forever unfinished, abashed by the need in the question, embarrassed yet still stubborn and proud. So different from his demeanor in the light of day.

He stepped over the broken glass, clearing it with a wave of his wand, and slowly wrapped his arms around me. He held me gently at first, unsure of exactly how to. It was the first time we had ever held each other, only a few casual touches exchanged previously. He held me because he wanted to, because he needed to, but he had seen firsthand my recalcitrance. He kept me gently, waiting for me to disentangle myself gruffly and without any semblance of grace.

But I didn’t, because I knew that wasn’t what he needed, and I knew that, whatever my qualms are about our predicament and whatever skepticism I have about his dubious affection, he has my loyalty then and ten million times over. As long as I live, as long as I breathe. I have learned to care for my own with what little protection I can offer, no matter how meager and wanting it is. 

So I put my arms around his waist, and let him tighten his own around me.

I didn’t ask if it was a nightmare. I knew. 

We were chest to chest, my ear buried in his neck, and I could hear his breathing, hear his heart beating. 

His fingers tightened with an inhale, bunching in the fabric of my shirt. Strands of his hair were damp by my forehead, and he was shaking. 

“It’s alright,” I whispered, holding him close. 

“It’s alright now.”

  
  


~*~

He will never forgive me if I let him continue living this way. Or perhaps he would, but I never will. 

This is all for Harry, even if he would disagree. My subject--I shouldn’t call him Harry, but I do. I call him Harry because I’ve become even more attached to him. Because I don’t want this to end. Because I’m losing sight of what’s important. 

He won’t stay after I fix this, and I need to prepare myself for this eventuality. I’m letting myself get too close and he’s inevitably going to leave. I’m the type of person who drives people away. I know it. It’s everywhere. It’s something about me, something that was planted deep within me that makes me difficult but clingy, vicious and defensive and cruel but painful in the neediness I attempt—and fail—to hide. 

There was a good man once in my life who wasn’t Harry. I didn’t love him, but I convinced myself I could. 

He was gorgeous. I couldn’t stand up next to him. I never in one million years thought he could think of me as anything other than a friend, and so I convinced myself I was content with that. 

And then, one night, we were drinking together. It was the middle of the night, with one nearly empty glass bottle of vodka held loosely in cold fingers and the other hand spread to the side, splayed to keep our balance as we walked along the railroad tracks. I stumbled. He fell. We laughed, and he took me by the arm and steered me to the side. 

We always talked about nothing. But that night he talked about books, the authors he loved. And when he got that light in his face, he kept talking. His cool demeanor melted away. 

I didn’t have much to say. I didn’t want to interrupt. Because I didn’t really care about his books, but I cared about how passionate they made him. I liked that spark, that interest. It made him real. Real in a way I couldn’t stop thinking about. 

And I realized that night that I was not content at all.

The next time we got drunk together by the railroad tracks, I kissed him. 

I never liked losing control. But I liked being drunk. It softened the sharp edges of the world, made things easier to handle. Made my tenuous friendships and strained relationships less anxiety-provoking: I found that for once, I lived a blessed, shining existence when I could just stop thinking. 

My penchant for booze-hounding got me put in a lot of bad situations. Many, long before this man I kept meeting at the railroad, which had no relation to him. Many which hurt me. Scarred me in different, deep and difficult ways. 

The situations I put myself in, by drinking to debilitation with people I didn’t know, with people I shouldn’t have trusted, in a time when I could not trust anyone—it lead me to bad places. It lead me to bad people. 

I had to mentally distance myself from certain events that transpired as a means of psychological defense. I joked about it with roundabout terms to others, back then. What a funny story, all my pain was.

Life is all about perception. If one can shift their perception, shift their paradigm, one can change reality. Reality as they know it, and the reality they tell people. That is what I told myself. 

But no amount of shifting my perception will change what I knew when I sat on the ground of my flat in England, three weeks after the war had ended, feeling dizzy with the spins and lost on my own and the world as I knew it coming crashing down around me when I realized that I had selected incorrectly that night when perusing the bar for a one night stand. It was supposed to be something different, something enjoyable, just a quick fuck, and I had selected a man I couldn’t trust, that he had hurt me while couldn’t hurt him back, while I was too drunk and stupid, so  _ stupid _ , and I couldn’t get it back. I never knew what truly it was that he took from me, but it wasn’t money, it wasn’t objects, it wasn’t a thing I could hold but it was a thing I could  _ feel _ , and I could feel the absence of it. 

And I simply  _ could not get it back _ . 

~*~

I still live with that absence. Like the survivor of some hellish botched surgery by a mad scientist. I woke up that morning and something was missing, but I don’t know enough to know what.

And then, I carried on. As the English do.

But this other man, this better man of the late-night railroad tracks, he didn’t know what troubling memories I’d kept cloistered in the dark recesses of my soul, locked away and revealed to no one. He didn’t know any of that when he heard me say years after the event transpired: “I hate myself when I’m drunk.” 

All he heard was the regret in my voice, seeping into my tone, my posture, my  _ being _ ...and he thought it was for him.

It would have been fine if we had left it at that. But winter night, one of those frigid winter nights where one feels like they’ll never be warm again, like they’ve forgotten what it ever felt like, the icy wind plucked my scarf off from around my neck and dropped it onto the pavement. He stopped and waited while I picked it up and put it back with numb and fumbling fingers. 

Then, he took my empty hand in his and laced our fingers together. 

We walked, hand in hand, and for a moment I remembered what warmth felt like. 

But then things went wrong. I asked too much.

We were by the railroad. He was smoking a cigarette. I stole it from his fingers and took an angry drag to taste his lips, because we were arguing and I was hopelessly maudlin. Stubborn, as a gentle descriptor at the best of times. 

I walked away. Stopped. Turned back. Stopped.

I stared at my shadow, elongated by the lamp post. Stretching into the blackness of that cold night.

We had been drinking. Again. As we did often, because we could not confront ourselves any other way. 

“We aren’t like the others,” he told me, cupping my face when he stepped to me. “I care about you. I  _ care _ about you.” His eyes were dark and earnest. I felt the soft fabric of his gloved hands at my cheeks. The small hairs of his scruffy beard caught the light, outlining his face.

“But this can’t happen. I’m  _ sorry… _ but it can’t happen.” His thumb stroked my cheek. “I can’t do this.”

I had tried to kiss him again. 

He said my full name, his voice breaking, and I held his wrists and kissed his palms.

I didn’t want to hear it.

“Let me kiss you one more time, when—when I can remember it clearly.”

That memory makes me nauseous. 

There was one last night we had together. The conditions of my confinement, loosely entitled “protection”meant he always had to travel to me. We hadn’t meant to stay, but the snow piled up outside. We had no floo, as it was winter. By the time we realized there was a blizzard outside, we were hazy drunk, so, no apparition. No Knight Bus, either. Not in this country.

I watched the snowflakes rain down outside the streaky window, blowing amongst one another while the wind whistled. The condensation rubbed off on my fingertips, pressed to the glass, a ghost reaching out from before me. I licked my lips, chapped and tingling from the alcohol. And I knew I was going to initiate something that would very soon become very, very painful for me.

Our shirts were off: Our hands were everywhere. The room was dark and quiet. The bed creaked beneath us. The wine made my head spin, but I felt every clumsy touch, every sloppy kiss.

_ I can’t do this _ , he’d said to me by the railroad tracks. 

I sat up. My hand was on his chest, and he was lying there, waiting for me, his hands light on my arms. I felt him under me, solid and steady and waiting.

“We shouldn’t,” I slurred, drunk and unsteady as I lurched off of him. “You’re going to regret it. I don’t want to do this if you’re going to regret it.”

He didn’t say anything as I stumbled to the door and opened it. Light spilled into the bedroom, breaking the spell of our mood under the cover of darkness, and I ungracefully made my way in a state of debauched dishabille to the couch. I threw myself down, rough and uncaring, and turned away from the room, pressing my face into the cushions. I didn’t want to come to terms with my aloneness. 

I laid there for five seconds, ten seconds maybe, before I felt a hand on my shoulder.

That was all he needed to do, simply walk ten steps after me, and all my resolve melted away like snow before the fire. All of his hesitance, all of my qualms because of it, all gone in a single touch. 

I was elated to have him. My grin nearly tore my face in two for the brief, hurried seconds before we kissed again.

I was so smug, so happy. 

Until the day after.

Things were quiet in the house. Like the calm before the storm. Or like a bomb had just gone off.

“I don’t think what happened was a mistake,” he said, crouched protectively over himself at the kitchen table like a bird of prey, eyeing me as though I was about to strike. “But…”

I watched him while he searched for the words and found his vocabulary lacking. I watched him tug at his hair and worry with his shirtsleeves. I didn’t like the fear in his body language. The nervousness of his fiddly little habits. They reminded me of other times, when people had been afraid of me for other reasons, and I’m afraid the disgust showed on my face.

I put my clothes back on and told myself to stop feeling. I stuffed my feet in my shoes, grabbed my coat, and did not say a word to him, and I told myself to stop feeling. I walked out of his shoddy rented room, away from the bland and uninspired facade of the building, into the glaring white and biting cold with a splitting headache. I shoved my bloodless, empty hands into my pockets and told myself to stop feeling. 

I found myself a headache cure in another bottle of pinot noir.

He moved on. Rather quickly. I had to watch him from afar, happy with someone else, and I couldn’t understand.

Perhaps his newest interest was less broken than I was. Less complicated. I was just a puzzle with missing pieces that couldn’t be figured out, thrown away and useless. 

Maybe I was ugly. So hideous I drove him away. So horrifying was my soul, and the aching parts of it I’d dared to show him, some brief mentions of family troubles, slight nods to trauma, certain small motions to recalcitrance…he didn’t know everything there was to know. He hardly knew  _ anything _ , in fact. 

But he found me too much to handle, anyway.

Maybe I was just there, and he was bored. Or sad. Or lonely. Perhaps a mix of all three, and I just happened to be the wrong person at the right time, and we met. And I didn’t know how to stay distant when he traveled to see me and held my hand in the city streets, didn’t know how to stay cool when he trusted me to talk about the small, secret things he loved.

In my pettier moments, I see that somebody else he was with. I haven’t kept up with them; I don’t know if they’re still together. I don’t want to know. But I see that someone else, and I think to myself, like the prideful Malfoy I am— _ at least I’m far better looking than he is.  _

But if there is one thing I have never been, never will be, and it’s to my great chagrin that I know it—I will never be  _ laid-back _ . I will never be  _ chill _ . To live in my head or to even peer into my mind is to be present in an ever-spinning vortex, and the thoughts never still, and the sounds never stop. I think, and then I think again, and just when I finish thinking I begin to over-think, and right around the time I believe I’m done with that is when I begin to panic. I have ten-year plans for every contingency: my farm burns down, my business dries up, the Death Eaters come back, and on and on. Ironically, the only situation I did not plan for is the one I currently find myself in. 

My mind is a steam engine, and though I like that I have the ability to constantly learn and to constantly work, it is uniquely tiresome. Some days I wish I were the one driving the engine, and it was not driving me. But to stop means to let the memories catch up, to let the fear come back, and I can’t do that. I cannot stop.

The only thing I can do now is focus on a solution. 


	4. Hazelnuts

One pale, knowing eyebrow raised. He always was too observant for comfort. His eyes were as piercing as his intellect. 

“How has the job been?”

“Better, now.”

“I was surprised when you returned to the Auror force.”

A grin. Hesitant, but playful. “So you have been keeping up on me. Not just for Teddy’s sake.”

~ **HAZELNUTS** ~

My subject has insisted upon accompanying me to the lab more often, which means work on the antidote is increasingly slow. It appears I may not get this done before winter hits, and when it does, the international floo and all other transportation will be shut down for a period of two to four months. They say it’s for security reasons, but it’s not. It’s because nobody wants to come into work when it’s so damn cold, and they actually have the audacity to act on it. And they go about it without even the fanfare of the French: these workers simply do not show up. I suppose that’s what I get for moving out of England. 

This wouldn’t be a problem, but if the international floo is closed, that means Harry will have no way of returning to his proper home. Unperturbed, he has told me many times that he is content here, and I…I’m not a strong enough man to tell him to leave. Not until he must. 

So I must get him out of my lab. Easy enough. I ask him to leave, and he leaves. He understands that I am far more competent in this environment than he will ever be after his milk bath.

But on some days when he’s particularly dispirited, after an optimistic hour or so of work I can smell baking bread, or peanut sauce, or chicken baking, or, on one very special occasion, I smelled steak. 

_ Merlin _ , I hadn’t had a good filet mignon in  _ years _ . Cows weren’t exactly in fashion in the part of the world which I now call home. Pork, we had quite a lot of. But no steak. 

“What…?” I asked when I walked in on a white tablecloth covering my scuffed kitchen table, the seats set for two with the wrong forks and knives out but nonetheless with valiant effort. There were bread rolls floating out of the oven and into a basket that must have been conjured. Spinach salad with strawberries, feta, walnuts and balsamic vinaigrette. Two plates of filet mignon, medium rare, slightly bloody. A side of green beans. 

And to top it off, he had a Bordeaux as well. A beautiful vintage. It was perfect.

Tiny yellow lights flickered about in midair, mimicking fireflies that played in the fields outside. 

Harry stood at the counter, fiddling with the bottle opener in his hands and grinning rather sheepishly. 

“Happy birthday, Draco,” he said. 

I did not trust myself to reply. 

I wanted what he wanted to give me. But I lacked both the stamina and the stomach. 

I had been burned once before, and with far less romance, by a man who lifted my hand in front of my myopic eyes and showed me the stars lining the sky above the railroad tracks. 

“I have work to do,” I replied. 

~*~ 

I run my fingers through a pan of hot, freshly roasted hazelnuts and roll the burnt shell off one. I pop it into my mouth, reveling in the satisfying  _ crunch _ it makes and the mild taste that fills my mouth.

Usually late August is the season to gather hazelnuts, but this summer was hot and dry. The fields are painted in brownish gold from drought, and although it is mid-September, some of the husks still stubbornly cling to the trees no matter how stiff a shake we give them. 

“I didn’t realize they grew like this,” Harry said to me as we were working, holding up a spiky, spider web-covered bunch. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hazelnut before, not unless it was in something.”

“I didn’t mean to grow them, actually,” I replied. “When I moved in, I found a few trees that were flowering at the time, and wasn’t sure what they were. I decided to let them grow and figure it out, if they ever bore fruit.” I waved my hand. “Nut. Lucky they weren’t cashews—those buggers make folks who touch it break out in hives. But this I can make salves with. Plus, roasted hazelnuts are some of my favorite foods. They remind me of autumn.” I shrugged. I could feel his eyes on me as I spoke—I didn’t usually divulge so much information, all in one go like that. Nine months and I was still cautious with what I shared about myself. My tongue felt clumsy in my mouth. “So…I decided to plant more.”

Harry and I spent a solid few hours collecting the small, spiky bunches of husks and nuts in the orchard. I made the mistake of jerking the branches of one tree while, unbeknownst to me, he knelt under it picking the fallen hazelnuts from the ground, and accidentally showered him with a number of quick little spiders. He handled it very well, much as I would not have, and to his credit only yelled a little. He stayed still while I plucked which ones I could find off of him and dropped them carefully into one of the larger vials I always carry around for such a reason. I’d been running low on spider silk. 

We both collected two buckets each, before I decided to bring them to the little structure I’d magicked the first year I lived here. It was little more than a tin roof over a table and chairs, and none of which were structurally sound, but it served its purpose. 

On our way, Harry paused to pluck a plum from a tree on the path beside him. It’s skin was dark blue and splotchy, that lovely ripe sheen. Just before he was about to take a bite, I stopped him with a hand on his wrist. 

“Wait a moment,” I said, taking the fruit from his hands. I dug my thumbnails into the hollow where the stem had been and tugged it in two. There, just in the middle by the pit, a small, plump worm wriggled about amidst his lunch. 

“Oh,” said Harry, looking rather less eager to eat.

“You never know when they’re just off the tree like this.” I tossed the halved fruit to the ground, and selected a number of others in its stead. “We’ll make sure they’re clean once we’ve sat down.”

He split the plums while I husked the hazelnuts and threw the cleaned ones into a pan for roasting. I listened to the wind pass through the branches and the bees and flies buzzing around us. I closed my eyes and let my head hang down, reveling in the feel of the sun on my skin, knowing that I would have to move and sit in the shade before long.

“How do you know to do all this?” he asked me abruptly. I cracked an eyelid.

“Hmm?”   
“All this,” he repeated, waving a half-eaten plum. “You have a beautiful farm. Plums, hazelnuts, pumpkins…a bunch of scary mushrooms and whatever else is over there in that greenhouse of yours. It’s just not…”

“Very Malfoy of me?” I finished knowingly.

He nodded, peering into my eyes. “Not without magic, at any rate.” 

His pupils were small in the bright daylight, his irises intersecting bursts of light and dark green. I shifted in my seat and shrugged. 

“Potions work best if the ingredients are pure,” I replied.

Once it became clear that I was not going to continue, he prompted me, “So you moved all the way out here?”

I gave him a tight-lipped smile and shrugged. “I didn’t have much of a choice,” I reminded him. “Besides, it’s not all bad. I speak enough to get by, here.”

He shot me an incredulous look. “You speak Abanian?” he asked.

I scowled. “ ‘Enough to get by’ isn’t what I qualify as fluency. It isn’t the same par as my French. I know a bit. Father…thought it would be prudent, when I was a child. He’d heard rumors.”

Harry hummed, brow furrowed. 

I didn’t like to watch his face change. I listened to the bees, and busied myself with the hazelnuts once more until my fingertips turned black with dirt and residue.

He’s gone to town, now, to pick us up milk and bread and a few other necessities. I wonder if I’ve said too much by bringing up Father. But he must not have any illusions of myself and my past. I am still the Draco Malfoy he went to school with and reviled. I am still my father’s son. It just so happens that I made one of two more objective choices than he did, and now…Now I am far better off, even though some may say that spending a good amount of time wrist deep in fertilizer and kneeling in muck trying to convince small green things to grow is not a good way to eke out a living. 

I create life. I make remedies to better other people’s lives. I am trying, now, to make one to better my own. The whole reason Harry is here, the reason he appeared in the first place, is that I have dedicated myself so thoroughly to my craft that I am presently one of the main voices of the international industry.

That, I feel, is honorable work. Far more so than sucking up to any politician or riding the high of my past successes. I have made my life for myself, and I owe it to no one. 

The Manor, uninhabited, lays disgruntled in Wiltshire. Perhaps it has gotten used to being alone, as I had before Hermione appeared.

  
  


The first time she came here, she didn’t have much of a plan beyond solving her case. She told me that her only goal had been to find me, since she had heard tell of both my abilities and my reclusion in both the herbology and potions communities, and she hadn’t thought of much else afterwards. Our past was of little consequence to her goals. As always, ruthlessly logical, unforgivingly intelligent. Of course she would have thought about the after, but she is so strong-willed, so bull-headed, she had full confidence she could beat me down with reason. 

Even with all her knowledge, it still took her a long while to locate me. I love my farm. It’s quite sequestered away from the rest of the world, here in this little mountain village. Now if only the villagers were gone too, it would be perfect. 

But nothing is impossible for the brightest witch of her age, and after six months of sleuthing, she appeared on my doorstep. Shivering, wet, and as bedraggled as a stray dog with hair twice as thick and matted. The icy snow of mid-January cut through all her warming charms and woolen layers like a finely sharpened sword. 

I didn’t quite believe my eyes until she managed to force through chattering teeth, “ ’Lo. May I…come in?”

I stepped back, opened the door wide, and ushered her inside despite my profound confusion and suspicion. I hit her with two different warming charms and a drying charm--the cold isn’t the killer around here so much as the damp. Told her to leave her boots at the door. As practical as she was, they had still soaked through. 

“You’re a difficult man to find, Malfoy,” she said to me, a modicum of reluctant admiration in her voice. 

_ Indeed _ , I thought. 

With good reason. 

“Drink?” I asked instead, and poured some honey brandy on the stove alongside the kettle without awaiting his response. Merlin knows, I needed something stiffer than tea. 

Hermione blinked at the steaming shot set in front of her. “Sip it,” I instructed. “It’s good. Warms you up.”

I knew it, too. Only a little alcohol to kickstart the system wasn’t all that bad, especially when it was so frigid that even walls and warming charms couldn’t keep the shivers at bay. It was when I drank a lot that things got…complicated. As I had found before.

She did, warily. And, gradually, she discovered that she regained the ability to bend her fingers. 

“Why are you here,” I asked, “unannounced, in the dead of winter, like a madman?”

“Well…” she began, clearing her throat. “Well. I suppose, the answer would be,” she flashed me a small wry grin just in this side of irony, “to see you.”

~*~

My cottage is very well stocked. With food, yes. But also with alcohol.

Unfortunately, I have been drawn to it in these past few years. Not so much during the war—it dulled the senses in a way which I could not afford if I wanted to stay alive. During some of the darker days, I am unsure that was a fact of my life, but all the same, I remained sober. 

After the war, however, this was untrue. Especially when such an…alluring…companion as the one I had who enjoyed imbibing as his primary source of entertainment. He was an interesting man, a spectacle at times and not particularly disinclined to efforts of self-destruction. Although I can’t say I’m not, either.

I took up drinking as a means of connection, and I carried on with it because it was convenient. It was convenient not to feel. That pleasant, floaty numbness was a relief after so many days of drudgery and difficulty. I found that I did not want to feel. I did not want to remember. And drinking, more than anything, provided that escape. 

I do not think I had a problem. I had no friends with whom to drink, so I drank alone. Never hard liquor, except for on the most frigid of mornings. Always beer or wine. Wine, more often. 

When I started I had a penchant for red, but I did not enjoy the nausea and the headaches the day after, and I disliked the color of my sick, the way it looked like something internal brought fighting to daylight. I did not like the way it stained my lips and teeth, bloody in its imagery. It drew up too many frightful comparisons. 

So I drank white wine. Not much—three glasses a day maybe. The stark fact that I consider this  _ not much _ is telling in itself.

I would buy the liter ones, cheaper and bigger, so that I would know never to finish a bottle. It was my routine. Work on the farm, work in the lab, and finish my day with a book and a few drinks. It helped in the winter, when there was less to do and more empty hours to fill. It was cold and lonely and I was without solace. If I became rather maudlin at times, well, I blamed the drink rather than my own lacking constitution. 

I drink less when Harry is around, far less. I still do not believe I have or had any sort of problem—it was my situation which drove me to drink, which is not at all an inspiring statement. But what was there for me to do? Estranged from everyone, indeed, for my own safety. Unable to reach the outside world in a cage of my own creation. I had little else to afford myself, and though I love sweets, I have never been adept at baking. 

Truthfully, the fact that I felt the need to hide it does not bode well for my former (and current) mental health. But he is here now, and although I do go through a bottle or two, it is in a week rather than a matter of days: and it is shared, which is most important. I can now qualify it as a social activity, one born once more from connection instead of isolation and loneliness.

That loneliness I lived with before he arrived was a living thing, a shade that haunted me wherever I went. I believed that I was strong enough to endure its presence, but it was persistent, and it would never leave me alone. I yearned for a touch, for a presence, for a simple conversation. I wanted to hear my name in someone else’s mouth, and it didn’t have to be a lover--a friend would have done just as well. Someone, that was all I needed, to prove that I existed, that I impacted the world, that I was not invisible.

But this was not possible. And all for my safety, certainly. Of course it was. Thank you very much, Mr. Minister, for being so kind.

No other motivations on the part of the Ministry, of course. No Malfoys, wrapped up in a bow us three, tied together and thrown out of civil company. I was a turncoat, not a criminal but still spat on - and this was my reward. I shudder to think of what my punishment may have been, and then I think of Father and I shudder even more. 

Some of the more difficult days, I wondered what it would be like to simply continue drinking. To never endure sobriety ever again. How remarkable that would be, to live life as though without one’s body, watching events take place from afar when one is physically in the thick of it. I would like a respite from the hurricane that my head becomes. But I never decide to do so. My farm needs me. I have myriad living things which depend on me for survival, and often, I have them to cite for my own survival. A symbiotic relationship.

It calls me though, in my weaker moments. Such as now. 

I do not want him to go. My subject. My Harry.

He is the only thing that has scared away the loneliness and has not left me grasping in his wake, unable to gather the bits of myself that he tore apart in my clumsy, heavy arms.

But he will, because that is what he does. He sprints through life, from one goal to another, always looking for someone to save or for somewhere to be needed. How baffling my life must be to him, encased in its own little globe. Perfectly formed, with only one individual and very occasionally one small black cat, surrounded by vegetation and magic. How baffling, and how sad. 

I do not have a savior complex. If anything, I have the opposite. Needing people terrifies me because I know that, in the end, people will always let you down. The only person one should ever need is oneself. And, if you are someone as difficult to love, as difficult to even get on with as myself, you must get used to the simple fact that you are going to be the only one who will stay. 

Certainly, I can be pleasant for an evening. Charming for a weekend. I know what to say, how to dazzle acquaintances, how to make witty banter and how to seem intelligent. But all these connections are shallow. And once they get deeper, these people begin to lean on you. You begin to know things about them because they have offered forth this personal information and willingly told you, willingly divulged their secrets to you. 

Now, you can assert your trust in them and share as well. This, I’ve found, only works best if you know a person quite well or—if for whatever reason you’ve engaged in this sort of conversation with this sort of person, a drunken night perhaps, a teary encounter—one you hardly know at all. This evens things out. Now you both know the secret workings of another. This is a means of creating a rapport, of establishing trust, in a way that often makes people feel camaraderie amongst one another. 

But you could also hold that information close. You know things about this person very few others do. Using it crudely, as a stick to beat them with in the world of casual gossip, could make you look uncouth and unsympathetic—so you must wield it gently. But with the right amount of pressure, with the right amount of feeling: you have power. You have power, and specifically, power over them. You have insight into their lives that few others do. 

Some people, most people, will take the power which has been vested in them and throw it away. They take their knowledge of you, and they say you are too much, you are too damaged, too cracked and broken, and they cannot deal with you. And they throw away what they have learned, and with it you and everything that makes you up. This is more damaging than gossip, more damaging sly remarks. This tells you that you are  _ fundamentally unworthy _ of their attention, because you are simply too much for one person to handle. 

So I have learned to keep myself close. And when it comes time to share, I do not open myself up to be vivisected, because I know the pain that will inevitably ensue. But I try my hardest to be present, because I know what it feels like when the party you trust is truly listening and is only quiet because they are waiting for their turn to speak. To those impatient hordes, your pain means nothing as long as they know they will be able to unearth theirs in turn. 

Besides, Father always told me I was bothersome. “Immature” and “difficult” were the precise words he used. Though I know enough of my father to understand that his judgement was fundamentally flawed at the best of times, those descriptors still cut deep and creep up on me when I am simply trying to live. Those adjectives and others like them, not particularly malicious and thrown at me offhandedly without targeted ill-intent, still follow me. If I cannot be an engaging partner, who will want to stay with me? How will I ensnare a person if my very presence rapidly becomes insufferable?

Harry has not yet left me, but it is only in due time. And the only reason he has not left me is that I am a poor potioneer at best, despite my thriving business and all the clients I have duped. I can make remedies, yes, excellent ones, but my efforts on the most important task I’ve set myself to post-war have not been well-received. I have made myself sick a number of times, once or twice exceedingly so, but I have found no true results. 

Because he is not here for himself. Unfortunately, he is not even here for me. He is here because he is compelled to be, because something nefarious lurking within my heritage has piqued the interest of certain receptors in his brain, and now he is under the deluded impression that we could, in fact, make a satisfactory pairing. 

Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. Pursuing disgraced intelligence agent and reviled Death Eater, Draco Malfoy. What a hilarious proposal. What a cruel trick of fate. What have I done to deserve this punishment?

Well, that is a ridiculous question. I know it quite well. My crimes are etched into my skin and burnt into my memory--the casualties of them, the victims I could not save, and the people for whom I bore witness to their suffering, will never stop haunting my nightmares and daydreams. 

No one is inherently deserving of anything, be it life, death, or anything in between. To be deserving means to have done something preceding to instigate that state, and to be deserving of anything is not inborn. But basing on the decisions I have made and what I have done and failed to do, I may hardly deserve love at all. I certainly do not deserve Harry Potter.

No potions had been administered to him previous to his permanent installation at my farm. No spells cast, no bonds formed. I checked, and then I checked again, and then once more just to be sure. 

The only way his continued presence could possibly make sense is if he was under a thrall. And although I am pure of blood in terms of magical lineage, well, that does not necessarily mean human magic. There are some ancestors, long back, who cavorted with certain members of the magical world. I had thought the line was too far away, the genes too faint and few between, to make an impact on my life. The last known Veela in the Malfoy clan procreated over a hundred and fifty years ago to no ill effect.

But then, my life has never been easy, and it has rarely been normal. My mind is sharp, and I’m thankful for that. Because even my body has betrayed me, and now, it is all I truly have left to me. 


	5. All Those Ridiculous French Things with the Tiny Portions that Cost Too Much

“I do, yes. I like to make sure you haven’t made any sweeping gestures.”

“Resigning as Head Auror wasn’t sweeping enough?”

A chuckle in response. “Sweeping, but unsurprising. One didn’t need crystal balls to foresee your disillusionment with that particular system.”

“Well, your blasted cat likes Hogwarts better than the Auror offices at the Ministry, at any rate.” He scratched his head, hair everywhere as always. “I thought it could be better, you know? I thought I could make it better. But after everything...and then when they took me out of the field, well. I’m not a planning type of person.”

“You always were too dynamic to sit still.”

A smirk. “Says the one who’s been all over the world, at this point.”

~ **ALL THOSE RIDICULOUS FRENCH THINGS WITH THE TINY PORTIONS THAT COST TOO MUCH~**

I don’t like when he’s away. I know it’s irrational; it’s not like he’s going to stay.

I have pushed him away far too much. This strange liminal situation is not healthy for either of us. I do not have the emotional capacity to support him, and yet still, he lingers. And even worse: I enjoy it. 

I shouldn’t hold on this tight, because of course, nothing we have between us is real. I hadn’t meant to let things get this far, to reach this level of comfort with one another, to obtain this type of routine familiarity. But this blasted cure won’t come quick enough, and I am not as confident as I once was that I will be able to discover it by myself. 

When he’s away I imagine that a weight lifts off his shoulders. His step becomes lighter, his easy smile even more readily springing to his lips. How much he’s changed from the glowering young man I used to know, back during the war, back before the fighting, back when we still considered each other enemies. I wonder, will I see that fire and brimstone once again directed at me, after I release us from this predicament?

His intensity was intriguing, but I think I would find anything he does to be so. I have always been fascinated by him, even before I knew myself for who I was. He was the pinnacle of status for nothing other than who he was, and he was the single thing I could never have. Of course, that’s because I had thought of him as a  _ thing _ , and not a person. People don’t generally take well to objectification, or so I’ve learned. 

He was never a prize for me to have. But having him near has been so nice. 

The embrace we shared that night, after his nightmares, was one of the only times I’ve seen him vulnerable. He shows anger readily, and frustration, and his happiness, delight, and laughter alight his face quick as a flame. But sadness, that burying  _ desolation _ that comes from surviving what people like us have, that’s something for which he’s become the definition of stoicism. I may have considered that a compliment years ago, but now I’m not so sure. I often suffer from an excess of discretion in terms of my more unruly emotions, and it has only caused me to suffer more because of it. Though, of course, Harry and I are very different people. We process feelings much differently, so it wouldn’t be becoming of me to project onto him.

I wonder who he’s with, though. Granger and Weasley, certainly. Their children, equal portions intelligent and boisterous, inheriting from their parents in turn, no doubt. His godson, my cousin, who I have yet to meet. Harry has brought up bringing him to the farm on occasion, smart enough to know that getting me back to England would be an exhausting and pointless task. There is little left but malice there waiting for me. 

I would like to see him. He was born the year after the war, so...he must almost have his letter. How time flies. Looking back on it now, it all seems so far away, and yet I really don’t feel much different. I suppose I must be, or at least I hope so, and I do know that I’ve grown in my beliefs and in my self-reliance, but I don’t feel like a twenty-six year old should, if there is any particular way someone of that age should feel. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve mucked up my whole life, but I can’t imagine doing much differently. My hand was turned for much of it, and when it wasn’t, I found I had simply had enough of fighting, no matter for what. 

I wonder if he’s with better company than me. Certainly, the people he calls his family would be better in their bustling household than my poor excuse for a lonely hovel. It is a hovel that I have worked hard for, that I have restored with my bare hands and magic, that I have built from brick and wood and stone and spellwork. The furniture isn’t lavish--there was only so much I could bring with international floo, and so the rugs are worn and threadbare, the couches purchased from charity shops and ruthlessly cleaned, the crockery mismatched and burnt black from my own misadventures before Harry and all of his culinary mastery came to be. He does not seem like the type to seek out excess luxury, but I was brought up under Mother’s scrutinizing eye, and nothing I live with would be fit to furnish even the smallest and most secluded guest rooms in the Manor. 

It grated on me when I first moved here. Occasionally it still does. What splendour I lived with in my childhood, what glitter and gold! But I didn’t appreciate it for what it was, because I knew nothing else. I was far more preoccupied trying to win my parents’ affections. If only I could have been  _ better _ than I was, smarter, a more engaging child, a more beautiful child, a more silent and well-mannered child, then maybe I would not have grown with all the insecurities which plague me. But I could never sit still, and I never knew how to talk to people. I always said the wrong thing, or danced the wrong dance. I had watched the peacocks in the garden, and learned that one asserted oneself by continuous eye-contact, so for an embarrassingly long time as a small child, I believed that was how one garnered respect. Bully for humanity that we aren’t as simple as peacocks. 

I always walked down the marble hall with mud on my trainers. I stuck my fingers in every pie that Mipsy left out to cool. I preferred to watch the House Elves at work, mystified by their lack of wands, rather than make polite chit-chat and exchange asinine niceties with yet another towering and well-starched guest of my parents’ drudgery, with their endless propriety and the infinite rules to their politesse designed to make those who did not live like us feel inferior. I ruined their lovingly crafted facade by eating with my hands and chewing with my mouth open. By mussing my hair and wrinkling my jacket and squirming in the uncomfortable robes that pinched. I was a child, not a statue and certainly by any stretch of the imagination not a decoration to compliment my ancestors portraits in bas-relief. Nothing I did was out of malice, of course, but out of ignorance, which was in some ways even worse. Malfoys, if anything, were supposed to be  _ deliberate _ . 

Well, I certainly became such later, though I still sometimes struggle with the banal intricacies of  _ making conversation _ . A conversation should spring forth naturally, robust and well-spirited, or it should not exist at all. It should not be forced into reluctant existence by some attention-starved lunatic muttering about the dreary weather. 

That’s something I like about Harry. If he has nothing to say, he doesn’t shy away from silence. Instead, he tames the quiet. He takes the all-encasing torment that silence can become, the wild shadow beast that stalks me when the sun sets on those cold winter days when there’s little more than six hours of light, and in his hands it flourishes into something steady and warm. It is calming. 

_ He _ is calming. 

He is not one to hand out casual praise, but he has complimented me on occasion. Knowing this, knowing what he thought and who he is, warmed me inside. 

He called me capable. It was when I was harvesting cherries, last spring. My fingers were stained red with the juice, but the calluses on the palms of my hands and the tips of my fingers allowed me to strip away the leaves and bark from the branches at a mercilessly efficient pace. 

I pride myself on being good with my hands. I have always loved knowing how things work, and I am talented at fixing things, a natural engineer of sorts if only because my curiosity cannot be assuaged until I have taken a thing apart and put it back together again. I have been told I do something of the same for people, and that it is uniquely off-putting. If only I could figure myself out as shrewdly. But no matter.

Farming, however, was never a thing I was educated in, either at school or at home. We had Herbology, certainly, but that’s quite a bit different from running a whole farm. Once things get going, though, the plants need quite little work. It’s all routine. It was getting into the routine, learning what worked, that was the truly difficult part. And the learning curve was steep. That first winter here, I didn’t eat much besides pickles and dried meat. My sodium levels would have given the mediwitches and wizards back in St. Mungo’s a heart attack of their own. 

I enjoy knowing that I have done a good job and made a good thing happen, something that I can see and hold. It gives me a feeling of pride that I never believed I could gain from something so simple. And, in my feral smile filled with eyeteeth, there is not a small amount of smug satisfaction in that my parents would be completely and utterly horrified to realize just how much pride I take in the life I have built for myself. 

There is one other that has stuck in my memory. There have been other compliments, surely, that left me with a glowing feeling low in my stomach that was warmer than that hot, honeyed winter brandy. But this compliment I remember in particular. Because it told me something about myself that I had not felt in years, if not decades. 

“We’re going into the city,” Harry had announced that afternoon as we lounged outside together in the late afternoon. “There’s a place I’d like to try.”

“A restaurant?” I asked in surprise, sipping my coffee, piping hot and bitter. 

“Mm-hmm,” he nodded. “I’ve heard it’s the best.”

I tutted. “We can make better food here,” I argued. “The food in this country is good, the quality of the produce excellent, but their dishes are simple. My farm has everything we could need to make the same thing, and your cooking skills are more than satisfactory.” Compliments still come difficult to me, sometimes, but I make the attempt when it’s warranted. 

Harry saw that I was posturing. My excuses were feeble, and really, I was just afraid to leave the quiet solace of my warm home. “Draco, you’ve not left your farm since I’ve been here,” he argued. “The only other people you see on occasion are your neighbors, and the two of them are so old they look about to keel over. Surely one night away can’t do any harm.”

I pursed my lips. The few times I’d been to town, I’d gotten stares for miles—I did not fit in at all, even before the rumors. The city, farther away and even less accustomed to me, would be worse. Harry was a bit better off, with his dark hair and swarthy summer tan, but my tow-headedness would always beget unwanted attention in this country—as well as back home. It defeated the purpose. I had come out here to be left alone, after all. 

I gripped my mug and did not reply, allowing the steam to wash over my face and soothe me. in recent years I had become a solitary creature. Harry’s presence was, at first, begrudgingly tolerated, then gradually accepted, and then, finally, enjoyed in a way that I simply refused to explore. But he was the only one. Anyone else and three was a crowd, not simply because it was a cheap adage. 

There were too many people to assess. To many people to jilt. And I no longer knew how to be polite, how to be attentive, how to make myself shine in the spotlight. I liked my plants. I liked my books. Orion was accepted on the rare moments he deigned to afford me his regal presence. And, occasionally, Harry was passable. These creatures were staid and predictable and I knew I could not mortally offend. I would not make a fool of myself around them because they had a solid measure of myself, and I of them. But in town, in the city, there were simply too many unknowns. My churning, analytic mind had grown into that of a recluse with time, and I preferred hermitage to whatever complex hell the life of a modern socialite would bring me. 

Harry sighed.

“One night,” he implored, leaning in with widened eyes. “It’s a nice restaurant, all fancy dress and whatnot, and it’ll have all those ridiculous French things you like with the tiny portions that cost too much. I promise we’ll have fun. Alright? And if not, you can tell me you told me so for another eight months until we finally go somewhere else.” One corner of his mouth curled up. He knew the offer was tantalizing. 

I exhaled through my nose and stayed quiet for a long moment more, just to make him wait. I did like all those ridiculous French things with the tiny portions that cost too much. It had been a while since I’d had good escargot. Duck heart. Red wine. And the pastry… 

“I will only come if I can bring a book,” I finally conceded. Harry’s smile obscured most of his face, undeterred by me previous hesitations. 

I was nervous when selecting what to wear. I hadn’t need of luxurious clothing in such a long time. All of my old robes seemed frivolous, and the dust of years undisturbed with its dry, unpleasant smell reached me as I opened the chest where I kept them. 

I picked an outfit that I had bought after the war while I still could tolerate living in England, before I had been sent to exile. It was one that I had worn pointedly to demonstrate to the media sharks the stark difference between myself and my parents. Although my efforts for the Order were recognized, it was still kept close to the vest in the Ministry. A semi-open secret of sorts. And there was much dispute on my treatment because of it.

The Aurors were still debating how best to ensure my protection, from the side of light and Death Eater kin alike, but that didn’t mean I would willingly stand public defamation in such a rag as The Prophet or on the cobblestoned closes and shadows of Diagon without a fight. So I’d gone out and bought myself a muggle suit.

I liked the contrast it made. It wasn’t black, because black was the color of darkness, the color of Death Eaters—it was a pale slate blue with a collared shirt of a deeper and richer shade, all pinned together with a string of golden brooches which have been passed down in my family for generations. Avant-garde and traditional. Muggle fashion with a pureblood twist. The media ate it up. I was not allowed to open my mail, or see it at all, but I was told that my letters doubled after they published my photographs. Whether or not that was good I never knew—everything got sent to the incinerator in the basement of the Ministry’s mailroom. 

I thought I looked passable, but my collar felt too tight. I normally prefer to be clean-shaven, so that was not a problem. I coated my abused cuticles in a healing serum and rubbed lotion into my hands so the cracks and calluses would be less evident. My father told me when I was young that one could always gather what sort of person they had met with by their hands and the quality of their handshake, and this was a kernel of wisdom, amidst many more kernels of much more dubious foundations, that I carried into adulthood. 

My hair would not fall how I wanted, and for all the products I made, I no longer knew how to use them with the precision and efficacy that my teenage self could. There was always a lock out of place, a curl that was just slightly unflattering. After forty minutes of fiddling, I threw up my hands and called it all off. My hair looked the same as when I had begun, and I could have very well just saved myself the frustration. 

“Are you ready?” Harry called from downstairs. “Our reservation is nearly gone.”

I was clean and manicured and well-dressed, even if my hair was not up to snuff. I felt like I was playing the part of a much younger me and the costume did not fit correctly. It pinched and it itched and I could not get comfortable, and no matter which way I turned in the mirror, I longed for my work trousers and sturdy gloves. 

If I introspection farther, I could easily understand that I was fixating on the imperfections of my physical appearance so I could ignore the racing of my heart and the way our history loomed behind it, shadowy in the candlelight and sat beside a well-cooked steak. 

But of course, I did not deign to do so. 

I reached for the book I’d selected, one of my favorites that was neither particularly scholarly nor particularly well-respected, but one that I lost myself easily within. Just holding it made me calmer, knowing that I had an escape if I needed one. I put a gentle Notice-Me-Not charm on it, and shrank it down to fit in my pocket. Really, this suit and it’s fine fabric weren’t made to actually make use of it’s pockets, but it would have to do.

Exhaling deeply and smoothing my collar, I left to meet him. 

Harry is not prone to verbosity as I am, but for all the words available to me, I could not fathom how to quell my anxiety as he could.

I found him in the kitchen, fiddling with his tie. He looked handsome, but that is no notable assessment. Handsome is simply his resting state. I was used to seeing him handsome and relaxed, in a chunky-knit sweater of Weasley invention and wool socks and tattered jeans. Dressed up, so effortlessly glamorous, he looked as though he would be well at home appearing on the cover of the latest fashion magazine, and was certainly out of place in my hodgehopdge kitchen. 

I knocked on the doorway. “I haven’t worn this sort of nonsense in ages,” I drawled, severe on purpose to mask my discomfort. I didn’t think it was nonsense, not really--I thought the clothes were lovely, and the brooch more so, but I could not feel that they fit me. I could not feel  _ I _ fit  _ them _ . Somewhere between fighting a war and becoming a recluse, I lost my taste for shiny things, in no small part because I couldn’t fathom that I deserved them anymore. How could I, when I had taken so much as a child that no one in my family had truly deserved?

Harry turned. When he saw what I was wearing his gaze warmed. He didn’t care what I said, nor how bitterly I had phrased it. He saw right through me, right to the bit of me that played the part, because if I had already stated that the whole thing was shite, nothing anyone said could prove me wrong or make like I did not belong. I had already asserted that I did not: I’d made a pre-emptive strike or sorts. 

But Harry had taken pains for a good night, despite my prickly unease, and for all he had done for me, wittingly and not, I owed him a gift. Even if it was something as meager as my reluctant presence. 

“You look wonderful,” he said softly, his eyes meeting mine. And just like that, whatever impatient vitriol I had been about to spit dried up in my mouth. He reached out to brush my hair back, that errant curl I couldn’t command, but thought better of it and brought his hand back down a moment before he reached me, leaving it to rest on my upper arm. It seemed I had forgotten how to breathe. 

“Ready?” 

I nodded, and away we spun.

For the rest of that night and into the next day, that book sat forgotten in my pocket.


	6. Milk and Honey

“I wouldn’t say _all_ over. Here and there.”

“More there than here, though.”

The sentence was a question, though buried. Subtle in a way he hadn’t anticipated the other being able to grasp. 

“Yes. More there than here.”

The air had been electric since before the conversation began. Charged with their history and the unknown lives between them. 

“How has Teddy been taking being one of your students?”

A bitten lip, a shake of the head. “He’s not really into Defense as a subject. Doesn’t look great in my part, but maybe that’s better. I don’t want him to be a fighter.”

“The children do need you, though. A teacher like you.”

“One who goes to fundraisers and intimidates parents?”

It was meant as a joke, or at least jokingly. But he saw through it to the wisps of self-consciousness within. Harry always was too hard on himself. “One who’s good. Who can show them right from wrong, as well as teach. One who cares.”

“Minnie has that in spades.”

“ ‘ _Minnie’_ far exceeds intimidating. For all her virtues, she is a terrifying woman. At least you attempt to be personable.”

~ **MILK AND HONEY~**

I didn’t dream of Harry this past night, which I would have rathered. He has a steadying presence. An appreciated one. A comforting one.

No, instead it was that trainwreck of a man I can’t call my ex-boyfriend, because we never even got that far and yet somehow I let him in enough to absolutely terrorize me.

In my dream we were in battle. We were never in battle together in real life. He was smarter than that. He knew not to get involved. But in my dream, we were. And after it, I touched his hand, and he held my shoulder, and even there I was about to start break-down sobbing because I knew he’d never touch me in real life again. 

It’s been years. Years since he ended things, and yet I still can't forget the buildup to a single night. Why?

I don’t even think I loved him. Infatuation, certainly. I can admit to that. I thought about him constantly, those months I allowed myself to think something could happen. All the things I thought about and obsessed over, the vivid internal life I lead with him, makes me so ashamed. Humiliated. Of course he wouldn’t want to be with me. My obsession bordered on alarming, which was unsurprising given my history, and even though I’m the only one who knows the extent of it, it hurt to have that other life destroyed. Because I couldn’t possibly have been alone in feeling it, even though I was. 

Merlin, all the things I did. The time I asked him to dance. The time I held his arm in public and he drew away. The time I didn’t kiss him, and he thanked me for it. 

I’m such a ludicrous fool. 

An obsessive hermit with an ugly personality who grips people until I break whatever we have between us because I know my time with them is limited. 

I don’t think I was in love with him, because love is supposed to be selfless and I was so, so selfish. I wanted him all to myself. He kept drawing away, kept rejecting me in small ways, and I kept paying it no mind, kept trying again, and it wasn’t until I got hurt, really, profoundly hurt, that I finally got the message. It finally got through.

He doesn’t even think of me anymore. I know it. I was just a quick fuck for him, and he moved on and on, and I was utterly infatuaed with him.

I try not to hate myself for it, but it doesn’t work. 

I hug my pillows and try not to wish for him back. I don’t want him back. Not anymore, I don’t think. I just want someone.

Anyone, right now. 

But I wish for Harry most of all. As desperate as I am, I’m glad he’s away right now. I don’t want him to see me like this. It wouldn’t be fair for him to see me like this. But maybe, after all, it would be good for him to see me like this - at my most broken, my most honest, so he no longer has to labor under any misconceptions of my halcyon stability. 

Why can’t I just forget what my life used to be? 

~*~

I have concocted a serum using monkshood, moonflower, castor oil, ground betel nut, and several other ingredients. I have exhausted the contents of my farm and greenhouse—the betel nut, in particular, was difficult to hunt down and will be more difficult still to replace. But I must begin getting creative. My subject remains the same as ever, and that simply will not do. I have had four coffees today, and I have a good feeling.

I was unsure at first of where to put it. It’s another topical serum, this, but it’s a good bit stronger than the first. On my back and forearms, I thought, perhaps—away from the heart. I only incorporated minute amounts of monkshood, but even that may prove uncomfortable later on. 

I should wait for Harry to be here, as a cautionary measure, but he is my subject. He cannot touch what I’ve been working on—this whole endeavor has been to protect him, and these potions are experimental. I do not want him that close to me. No, I will manage with mirrors and myself. I cannot wait, and I don’t want to disturb him. I will do this now, and possibly we will see something change, finally. 

I have taken my measurements. Heart rate, blood pressure, the basics. They are written in my journal, alongside the recipe. Just in case, I have brewed two potential antidotes with neutralizing agents in case an emergency emerges, one for topical application, which I only make when using salves, and one for ingestion. Here’s hoping I won’t have to use either. 

Now, all I must do is wait for it to be absorbed into the skin. 

I peered into the mirror while I wait. My hair is far shorter than it was when Harry arrived. I had grown it out for years, acting as much-needed insulation for the cold winter days and easily plaited and pinned up in the sweltering summer months. When I let it loose, it fell like a sheet to my mid-back. 

I’m unsure why I finally decided to cut it. Boredom or a need for change, perhaps. Either way, it is back to the length it was in grade school, maybe a bit longer. Without all the gel, it curls on my forehead and around my ears. I can just gather it into a small bun. And, unlike as in childhood, my hair has darkened with age. 

Maybe if I had been as diligent with the preservation and conditioning potions as my parents instructed me, I would still have that characteristic Malfoy platinum, all natural of course. But my hair care had been derailed by the inopportune appearance of a war during some of my more critical years, and now, the only way to retrieve that silvery blonde is by spellwork, dyes and glamours. Perhaps if I followed a more careful routine, I could convince it to return to something of its former luster, but I no longer have the time to devote to my appearance. My farm needs me, and there are poor few now for whom I need to look nice, anyway. 

Mother would be horrified if she saw me. She would tell me I looked _common_ , replete with a worn button down and threadbare workman’s trousers.

She has not seen me in a long, long time.

“I like the haircut,” Harry said the night I cut it once he’d returned from a trip into town. He’s become my errand boy, as I don’t enjoy leaving the farm. He indulges me. Oh, what sweet irony. “It suits you.”

I replied, “Your hair suits you too”. Whether or not that was to be interpreted as a compliment was entirely up to him. I smirked and found myself terribly clever. 

But more than just a haircut, my face itself looks different after the months spent with him. The lines around my mouth and eyes are less pronounced. I no longer have as many nightmares, and the receded bags under my eyes prove it. Even the skin around my nails is healthier, not as worried at by my own filthy habit of picking at it when I become anxious or distracted. By all things visible, it seems my subject’s presence has done me well.

I cannot allow my vision to be clouded simply because I miraculously enjoy his presence. I am sacrificing for the good of us both. In the future, I know I will thank myself. 

I must stop writing for a moment. I believe I mi—

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


~*~

I do not particularly relish the idea of dying, but I have entertained the idea of death not uncommonly. I believe it my familiarity with it which makes me a bit more cavalier than I probably should be about my own health and safety. 

When I was little, I didn’t think much about my future. I knew Father was someone respected and important, and Mother was a towering, elegant woman, so I assumed I would be just like Father and I would get a wife just like Mother and we would all live in the Manor in a wonderful, sparkling fantasy together.

I am not sure what I want anymore. I think sometimes, just to be left alone would be enough. But that is such a lonely life, with no one except the ever elusive Orion to keep infrequent company with. 

I still don’t know why I am here and so many others are not. I dislike not knowing. It disturbs me in deep ways, ways with roots that I can’t manage to rip out. Every time I think I’ve cleared my mind, these thoughts come creeping back.

What the hell is the point of it? Does there even need to be a point? Why do I feel like there does, if all we’re doing is sitting in a waiting room trying to keep ourselves entertained before we’re ushered into the dark inevitable?

I can’t answer these questions, and in all the literature I’ve read, I haven't found the answer there either. I find satisfaction in giving life to green things, and I find satisfaction in knowing what they are used for. I enjoy ordering the orderless: nature does not like growing in neat rows and columns. Taming the wild. 

If only I could figure out how to tame the wildness that lives within my head.

~*~

I don’t feel well. My skin is hyper-sensitive, and even the air against it is irritating, like grains of sand on a sunburn after a day at the beach. 

Everything is too bright. I was not in my basement lab when I resurfaced from unconsciousness - I was in the bath. 

My head ached as I lifted it to look at myself when I first awoke, and the water shifted around me.

Actually, the liquid surrounding me wasn’t water: it was milk. Mixed with something. Honey. And the faint tingle of magic, spells and charms alike, hummed through it.

I heard the door creak, a faint noise that spiked through my eardrums like a cannonball, and I couldn’t help but make a small sound of discomfort. A pristine white towel appeared beside me on the edge of the bath. 

“Call me when you need help getting up,” Harry said from somewhere above me. His voice was flat and neutral--an affect that he’s rarely taken before in my presence. When I squinted up at him, he’d already turned away, and I couldn’t catch a glimpse of his face. 

I laid in the bath and watch the ripples in the liquid, trying to remember. The experiment. The ingredients. The dizziness. 

And I remember now, and wish I didn’t. 

When did he find me? And in which sort of a state?

I don’t know how long I have been soaking, but it was enough that there is no immediate burning on my skin, and I don’t feel that irritating residue moonflower can sometimes leave. Even the dark stains from the betel nut has washed away.

I did not call Harry when I lifted myself out of the tub. I was unclothed save for the pair of boxers that he declined to Vanish, and thinking of Harry helping me in my wretched state made my cheeks flush with embarrassment. I did not need to live through it all a second time, awake and aware of everything as it happened. 

I gripped the side and carefully hoisted myself out. My arms and legs shook and my head swam from the effort, but I was able to slowly stand and cover myself. After a drying spell, I stowed my wand, which was placed helpfully by the faucet, behind my ear. Holding the sink with whitened fingertips, the fine bones of my hands visible, I was able to make my way to the hall. It is only ten steps to my bedroom, but it felt as though the distance was much longer. My house had become a boat, and the floor lurched and swayed with the sea’s unpredictable swells.

Once at my bed, I sat and held my head between my hands. Many of the ingredients I used in my salve had toxic properties, but only if ingested. Moonflower--a hallucinogenic. Monkshood is dangerous at every turn, causing shortness of breath and heart palpitations, but I put it through a series of spells to remove a deadly amount for a topical applicant. 

I ran a hand over one of my biceps, still sensitive. I squinted at it, my vision still foggy and my head filled with cotton, and felt a sensitivity I hadn’t noticed before.

Miniscule little scrapes. Hardly anything, really. 

Calling cards from the ground betel nut. 

Betel nut has abrasive qualities even whole, and is known to cut the mouths of its users. It’s natural red pigment had masked the irritation it caused my skin, and in my haste to discover a cure, I hadn’t paid as much attention to my own ministrations and discomfort as I should have. The monkshood must have gotten absorbed into the bloodstream from there.

I summoned a pair of soft sweatpants and managed the slow process of dressing. By the time I finished, I was sweating and my chest was tight. My stomach roiled. 

I find I cannot stop shivering now, even with my clothes. 

As shallow as it is amidst the idea that I have poisoned myself, the thought is in my mind. One notable stage of bodily shut down, the kidneys and the liver overwhelmed, is release of bowels. 

_Merlin save me._ When it first crossed my mind I buried my head in my hands and tried not to think about dying. At least now there’s absolutely no chance of him being overly afflicted with beliefs about my grace and elegance. 

~*~

When Hermione first appeared in my life, it was of course not for pleasure or of a personal nature. It was for work. 

“I’m with the Aurors,” she told me that cold winter night, her hot cup of brandy still nearly untouched. “I have something that might interest you.”

I eyed her skeptically. “If it’s about the war, I’ve already told your people everything.” Merlin knows, she would have had reasons to nurse her grudges. My face stung with the duel memories of her fist and of my actions. 

“No, no, it’s not that,” she hurried to say. “I was talking to Neville and he recommended that you may know some things that could help clear up a case I’ve been working on.”

I cocked my head. “I thought you needed special clearance to go abroad?”

She ran a hand through her tangled hair, got caught partway through, and laughed uncomfortably. “Technically...yes. But you came highly recommended, and I am a firm believer that knowledge has no borders.”

Of course. This is the girl who would face down the Dark Lord for a quality education. I pursed my lips and thought about what talking to her might mean. 

Could I trust her? It was only a few years since everything had ended, and I hadn’t seen her in almost as much time. We had a few brief encounters on the street, a small and a private ceremony acknowledging the efforts of espionage agents both living and deceased a few months after the war, a few met glances on the street. In England, I had been keeping up on her and her compatriots through perusing the Prophet with vague interest at best, the tribulations of our lives having shaken off the resentment I used to have for her, superceeding me in all courses at school. 

I knew very little about the woman who sat before me now. Was she really trying to solve a case, or making one against me? 

I hadn’t done anything illegal where I lived now, but then, the rules here are far more relaxed than those in England. She may have been trying to book me for the growth and dissemination of certain controlled substances, perhaps, but I didn’t think that was it. Not unless the grudge she harbored against me was more robust than my own, which I doubted. She was a champion of logic, though perhaps backwards at times. I, in all things, tended to be more emotional by far. Recklessly so. 

Besides, she’d talked with Neville. Neville, somewhat ironically, had become the one man in England that I trusted, and the only one I acquiesced to work with. If Granger came recommended by him, I didn’t think her intent would be nefarious. 

“What sort of a case is it?” I asked warily. 

“Some sort of potion, but we can’t figure out what,” she explained. “Neville referred me to you because he said you knew more than him. High praise,” she added with raised eyebrows. 

I picked at my cuticles thoughtlessly, distracted. “What do I get out of it?”

“Once we settle the case, I’ll tell the papers to credit you as my counsel. And of course, I’ll pay you the rate that any of our advisors would be. ”

“Absolutely not,” I replied immediately. Myself, mentioned in a poisonings case? Wouldn’t that be something for the Prophet to run with. Give them one grain of truth and they’ll make a whole beach of lies. “I don’t need money, and I don’t want the media attention.”

She blinked. “What _do_ you want, then?” 

I thought about it. What did I want?

Company. Merlin, I wanted someone to talk to in a language in which I was familiar. I wanted something different other than the drab pit I’d dragged myself into. I was so lonely, I would have even settled for Granger’s presence. 

But could I ask her to talk to the Ministry, to champion a change in the logistics of my protection? They said I was to go to this area for safety, but that was a bold-faced lie. This part of the world was and still is a pot bubbling over on the fired stove right now, and none of the capital cities are safe from violence. Even the smaller towns have their issues, have suffered more than their fair share of bludgeoning, and I have no more to give to battles. I would take isolation over more bloodshed: it was getting, and indeed had gotten very old very swiftly. All the Ministry wanted was me out of the way, the difficult character I posed to them. As spies always are. 

But maybe if those I turned against were out of the picture, I could petition for myself. 

“Just get the bad guys,” I said tiredly, waving my hand. “As you always do.”

  
  


The first case was a poisoning with a concoction of yarrow root alongside a slow-acting cousin of the deadly toxin ricin (dubbed rather confusingly as robin) and the steeped seeds of a very particular magical South American flower. When mixed together properly and with sufficient spellwork, it produced a potion which would induce seizures and heart failure anywhere between forty-eight and seventy-five hours after ingestion: plenty of time to create an alibi. I couldn’t tell Hermione who did it, but I could lead him on the right path of those suspects who might have been able to obtain all the necessary ingredients.

The second was a man strangled in his bed: his wards were unbroken and no intruders had broken in the night of the death. How does one strangle themselves? 

It did not seem like a murder, but through me, Hermione had become even more aware than she already was of the dangers plant could pose. And because of it, she brought me a sliver of what is known as a magical variant the Strangling Fig, a type of tree which latches onto its victim and syphons the life from it. I found out the salacious details of a jilted lover and a long-drawn affair not long after.

The third was more nefarious: it took a long time for me to crack it, and time was of the essence. My research is primarily plant-based, as plants are generally silent (with notable exceptions, such as the mandrakes who I have learned in adulthood not to bother with fingers in their screaming little mouths) and still (there are many reasons I keep my more deadly and magical specimens locked away in my greenhouse, the untrustworthy Devil’s Snare being one). I have a deep love of magic and an aptitude for spells which was drilled into me at a young age, so I am adept at unraveling it when need be to retrace the steps an amateur potioneer took to create a draft of liquid _Imperio._ But, after four weeks of research, I could not find which fungi, tubor or leafy green had been placed as the primary agent in this noxious substance that induced erratic behavior, violent hallucinations, and susceptibility to suggestion and paranoia. It made its drinkers appear demented, and endeared them only to their poisoner, accusing their loved ones of fraud, betrayal, and maliciousness. It had been used in more than one grab at an old widow’s will, and though they had the perpetrator, the Aurors could not fathom his weapon. 

Well, I found the answer eventually, and it was nowhere in my deadly garden. Secretions from the skin of a desert toad - and who gave me the idea but Neville and his beloved Trevor (the Third) themselves. I did not have the equipment to house a desert toad, not the materials to test its properties. But my suggestion was all the Aurors needed for a warrant, and lo and behold, in the basement of our man’s humble abode sat twenty-odd miserable pallid little creatures. 

And on and on it went. Sometimes the cases were simple: sometimes they kept me up for weeks in cycles of sleepless nights. There are still a few which I think about during my brief periods of respite, and they trouble me because I never managed to figure them out. Even more proof that I am fallible.

I knew that something was troubling Hermione, and it wasn’t simply one difficult case or a suspect fallen away. As time went on, she was less willing to talk about his cases, though I knew she still worked many. She often had a preoccupied look on her face and bags under her eyes. 

Eventually, she began bringing Harry. At first, that was difficult. Frigid. Icy, even, for both parties. 

But soon he began taking over. He began spending more time here. Sometimes even alone with me. 

Sometimes he would come over with nothing more than the shadow of a case, and instead of working on it would spend the day or the weekend watching me in the lab or flying through the mountains or sitting pensively in the non-lethal garden with a mug of tea. His high-profile cases dwindled and I wondered if it had anything to do with his stalling work ethic, or whether the cause and effect were reversed. 

As time went on, he talked more about himself and less about his work. On the occasions that I did bring it up, I was often met with a scowl, the small noise of a clucked tongue, and pursed lips. I learned not to ask unless he was readily forthcoming.

I learned why one night, when I was awakened by a frazzled Orion batting urgently at my face and the sound of my wards going off. 

I jumped out of bed and lurched for my wand. Luckily Orion is light on his feet, because my small feline friend was flung off of me in my haste. He ran to the window while I located the breech in my wards and prepared myself to apparate, casting a twice-strong shield spell and a muffling charm, hoping my presence would remain undetected. If my intruder was indeed where my spells read he was, he would be quite preoccupied, anyway.

My wards are not strong magic. They are composed of confusion charms and the magical equivalent of a simple padlock, mostly to befuddle whichever muggles decide to wander my way. But for the aggressive intruder, magical and determined enough to work through my wards, I have put in place something different.

When I appeared at the scene of the entrance it was plain to see that my unwelcome visitor was already quite busy with all the shrieking and writhing. Because I have a mean streak, I summoned his wand and cast a binding spell between him and his new friend, ensuring they would be stuck in close proximity for the time it took me to figure out how to summon help. 

It was with a dull pang of shock that I recognized Travers’ twisted visage. I’d always had disdain for him: an uncouth loudmouth with a penchant for posturing. At best, a coward, and at worst, a pathetic little grub of a human being. 

I was unsure of how many Death Eaters had, as of yet, evaded capture. Certainly I had never expected Travers to be among them. Rookwood, perhaps, had he not died of old age in hiding, his body found weeks later who but the muggle police forces. Yaxley or Dolohov, I had also prepared myself for. But I had been in hiding for so long, and taken so many pains to remain discreet. 

After all of my efforts, it was _this_ buffoon who found me?

It was in strange and troubled spirits that I placed immobilizing, tracking, and monitoring spells on Travers and returned to the house to make a floo call. Luckily it was not winter. Luckily, I had heard Harry say his not-so-humble abode many times upon his departure. Luckily, as the blood inheritor of Grimmauld Place, the house would always accept me no matter how many hands it changed. Blood loyalty runs deep in the Malfoy family and our wares. 

The living room I remembered from my childhood did not appear as I expected. It was less dusty, less dark, and far more...welcoming than two decades prior. It was also, notably, quite empty. 

I was unsure of how to proceed, if I should simply wait with my head in the fire or if I should attempt to step through. The Ministry had set tracking spells on me when I arrived at my hiding place, officially for my protection but presumably for my ostrification, and I was unsure of what would happen if I tried to enter England without their express acceptance. 

But, then again, I had time. Travers was not going anywhere. And I have quite a vicious streak of my own. 

I decided to wait. 

Within five minutes, he appeared. His hair looked like an explosion on one side. He wore a single sock. His nightshirt was a heinous orange Cannons rag that at one point of its existence had been bright and sported a hole in the seam of an armpit. It had a stain of questionable origin down the front, and I remembered once again that he ate like a small child. 

“Draco?” he asked, dropping to his knees at the fire and pushing his glasses up on his nose. “What’s wrong?”

“I believe you’d best come through--” I began, interrupted by his waving hands and retreated from the fire. He was beside me within moments, and I was waving ashes away from my face. “Though you may want to report this to your Auror friends.”

“What’s wrong?” he repeated. He had that hawkeyed set to his face, his wand held aloft in a clenched fist with high shoulders. His eyes were sharp, and they scanned me and the room with a shrewd and calculating gaze. I had never called him before, and he knew it meant trouble. 

I flinched away as he cast a swift and unwelcome _Protego_ over me. If only mother could see me now, accepting help from Harry Potter. “I’m fine. I have it handled. I just need your help.”

His eyes bore into me, and he didn’t need to speak a word. Now wasn’t the time to try to talk. I summoned him a pair of shoes. 

“You don’t want to step near the plants without protection. Wear these.” I handed them over and waved a _Protego_ of my own to him as well. “They get angry.”

“What the hell did you _do_ to him?” Harry’s eyes looked liable to roll out of his skull, his expression one of both shock and morbid intrigue.

Travers was, unbelievably, still making some unfathomable noise. I thought he would have tired himself out by now, but his shrieks had just morphed into whimpers and discordant wails. I honestly hadn’t believed he’d had the strength--perhaps I truly had misjudged him.

“ _I_ did nothing,” I replied, vaguely affronted. I believed we knew each other well enough for my reputation not to preceed me. “His foolish arse was the one to walk into the Stinging Trees.”

“Looks like a fair bit more than just a sting,” Harry said, taking a small step back from the plants around us. For the first time since the war, and probably since before it, he looked at me with no small trace of wariness in his eyes. 

It made me uncomfortable to be feared, however little. It reminded me that I could, very easily, become something fearsome. 

I ignored my emotions and nodded grimly. “They have been known to cause heart attacks and kill horses. This isn’t even the magical strain. Don’t touch the plant fibers.”

“Noted,” he replied, not looking reassured as I cast a levitation spell on my displeased guest. 

“What should I do with him?” I asked, wand held aloft.

Harry sucked his teeth. “I have to take him into booking,” he said. “We have to figure out how he found your location.”

I made a noise and dropped Travers unceremoniously in front of him, displeased. I had built a home for myself. My plants could not abide much magical handling. The thought of abandoning them and replanting my garden from scratch was not a pleasing one. 

All Travers’ noise was beginning to give me a headache. I slapped a silencing charm on him.

“Try not to touch him,” I warned Harry. “The fibers will still be on him. They can be transferred by touch, and then we’ll have to yank them out.”

He shuddered involuntarily. “Alright. I’ll see about flooing him to the Auror Department without maiming myself. And I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he added. 

“I have everything perfectly handled,” I replied defensively, but he was no longer listening. 

“We have a problem.” Hermione’s face appeared in my fireplace not forty minutes upon his departure. I was drinking marjoram tea and trying to quell my turbulent thoughts, unsuccessfully. Her interruption was less unwelcome than I would have otherwise thought, considering his message. 

She did not look any less strained than before, but he wasn’t screaming like Travers was. So I asked, “Who touched him?”

“Ronald.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course,” I grumbled. “Can St. Mungo’s not help him?”

“We brought one of the mediwizards in for Travers. No one can make heads nor tails of your absolute hellplants.”

I _tsk_ ed. “Like I said, you just pull the fibers out. But you can’t touch him. Give him some hot wax and a shot of whiskey and he’ll be fine.”

Hermione remained troubled. “They’ve been trying to remove it magically--”

I threw up my hands. “I put a signature ward on the plants. To use magic to get them out, you’d need my wand. You don’t always need magic to solve your problems. Bring him through, I’ll fix him.”

Her jaw snapped closed from where it had dropped after I mentioned not needing magic. “Well, right then.”

And enter, one red-faced, clench-jawed, sweaty ginger into my living room nursing a reddened and swollen left hand. After five years with nary a guest besides his wife and the Chosen One, and now, today, I had not one but _two_ other visitors to round out the trifecta. I should have tidied up had I known I was to be so popular. 

I summoned a shot of brandy and left it to steam on the coffee table for after my work. I really wasn’t joking about the hard liquor: he’d be grateful afterwards. 

Alongside that, I summoned my emergency medical kit from the lab. Being careful not to touch him, I applied a layer of hot wax with magic to his palm, where the stinging fibers seemed to be most populous. To his credit, he didn’t make a sound.

“This is going to hurt,” I warned. Weasley grunted. Whatever pain the wax would do was probably nothing to the agony he was currently in. His face was becoming an alarming shade of purple. 

I ripped the wax off his hand and inspected the strips, noting the small, fine plant hairs on it. By Weasley’s sigh of relief even after the affliction of hot wax on his palm (a terrible place) seemed to mean most were taken out, but I Banished the used wax and applied it twice more to any places I felt may also be afflicted with a fair bit more glee than was professionally warranted. 

After the worst of it, I laid down a soothing balm, cast a cooling spell on him and wrapped his hand in bandages. 

“Drink this,” I said, less gracious than my mother trained me to be. But then, she never trained me to be gracious to Weasleys, although now I suppose that, as a blood traitor myself, my mother’s lessons don’t matter much.

He spluttered when the liquor met his tongue and I added a half smiled “Sip it!” 

“You’re just cruel, you bloody bastard,” Weasley coughed, pounding his chest with his good hand. “Not enough yet that I’ve suffered from your demon tree, you’ve got to poison me too.”

I wrinkled my nose. “It’s not poison,” I argued. “It’s brandy. Homemade.”

Weasley ogled me. “You’ve given me _brandy_ after a medical procedure?”

“Well,” I considered, “do you feel better?”

Hermione, her entrance unnoticed during the flurry of activity and adrenaline in removing the fibers, snorted from the corner of the room. 

“I’m certain you do,” I assured Weasley. He remained dubious, like a fool.

“So that’s how we should tell the mediwizard to care for Travers?” Hermione asked. 

I shrugged. “I suppose. Can’t you leave it for a bit?” I asked. “He was trespassing on my property. Most likely with the intent to do me grevious bodily harm. I’m not in a particularly forgiving mood, presently.”

“How long will the pain last if it’s not treated?” asked Weasley, looking nauseated and morbidly curious despite himself. 

“Oh, up to a year,” I said distractedly, clearing my medical kit. “If he doesn’t kill himself first.”

“ _Merlin_ ,” Weasley breathed, horrified. When I glanced at him, his freckles seemed darker and more numerous than usual in his bloodless face. He turned to his wife, instinctively it seemed, searching for some sort of reassurance. 

Needless to say, they called the mediwizard.

I could not sleep that night, and all the better, because I once again had a surprise several hours later. 

“I’m sorry,” Harry began, looking wrung out, “but I’ve come to stay.”

Turns out the Ministry had finally decided to become serious about the protection part of witness protection. Though how much of it was the Minister and how much of it was Hermione, I have cause to wonder.

“I can protect myself,” I assured him. And myself. I glowered, for good measure, because it is one of my premier talents.

“I know,” he retorted. Though he did not deign to glower back. “Merlin, that man’s screams will haunt my nightmares for a good long while. But you’re not an Auror, and you shouldn’t have to resort to those sorts of measures. Hermione has a baby, so she can’t leave. And I...can. So I’m here.” 

“Why you?”

He didn’t answer. Either because he was the only one besides Hermione who knew where I was, or because he was the only one who, for whatever strange backwards reason, cared. Both answers I could deduce for myself, and either one sufficed. 

“What’s the catch?”

 _Now_ the glower. “There is no catch,” he snapped. “You shouldn’t even be in this bloody shed in the middle of nowhere. Kingsley has done a piss-poor job, all because of whatever damn popular vote decided this. I don’t give a damn about his protocols anymore. I’m staying because it’s the right thing to do, and there is no bloody _catch_.” 

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Nobody had offered to protect _me_ before without some sort of strings attached. So I paused. And I considered.

Boy Wonder may have been the pinnacle of altruism, but there had to be something he wanted. I just couldn’t figure out _what_. Not then.

I stood in the living room, my hands clasped around one another, standing awkwardly in my pyjamas still. “I am not going to offer you a brandy.”

Harry laughed. “Thank Merlin for small miracles.”

He never told me when he quit the Auror force. He just stayed, even long after his assignment should have been terminated. His tent in the yard still stands, replete with hidden extension charms, but it is barren and unoccupied. I am not sure when exactly he moved in - it just seemed natural, against all odds and my rigid introversion. He is here. 

That was months ago, now.

Thank Merlin for small miracles, indeed.

Will he stay any longer, or have I finally pushed him too far?

I don’t think I want to know.

~*~

I have decided upon sequestering myself in my bedroom for the rest of my life and never coming out. I have already secluded myself from the whole of the outside world: what is a few more rooms? My greenhouse will suffer, as will the farm, but it is a small price to pay for never having to face Harry again after my horrendous faux-pas.

I stare at the ceiling for thirty minutes upon waking. I have no clue how long I slept, but the window is open and bright with sunlight, spreading its rays across the wall of my bedroom. I can hear Harry downstairs in the kitchen, and listen to him until the sounds of chopping and frying recedes and footsteps replace them. 

He always said that cooking calmed him down, helped center him. But he doesn’t look calm when he appears in my doorway. His expression is purposefully blank, a stone-faced mask that I wonder if he acquired from me. 

“Do you need help with the stairs?” he asks. 

“I’m not hungry,” I reply, biting my lips. My stomach churns at the thought of food, even though I had thought myself hungry just minutes before.

“Doesn’t matter,” Harry says, walking over to me and sitting beside me. “You’re coming downstairs, and we’ve going to have a mug of tea and talk this over.”

I shoot him a pained look. “Must we really? Can’t we just sit silently and stew in our own individual emotions before drinking them away like all the illustrious Malfoys before me?” I grin crookedly, trying for humor and landing somewhat short of the mark. “It worked so well for them, after all.”

Harry doesn’t laugh. His mask doesn’t even crack. Instead he offers me his hand. “Come on,” he prompts. “I want to talk to you about what happened, and it will be easier with tea.”

~*~

“I can’t. I’m sorry. Just leave it alone, Potter.” Everything I said began and ended brokenly, fragmented. I couldn’t put my thoughts to words. I didn’t know how to do this and I didn’t have the energy to explain. 

Harry licked his lips and stared at a notch in the wood grain of the kitchen table.

“Draco.” His lips were pursed, his brow furrowed. The hand of his not holding the mug curled and uncurled into a fist in his lap, searching for something to do. “It’s alright if you have...PTSD, if there’s something bothering you. But don’t…” He took a shaky breath. I ripped at my cuticles nervously, half a tick, half a punishment. “Fucking stop that,” he muttered, and grabbed my hands. His palms were warm. Strong. “Draco, when I saw you down there, I thought--”

“Please don’t tell me.” My lips were a white line. I took my hands back from him and folded them in my lap, fingers interlaced with white knuckles. Everything strained and bloodless.

“No, I thought you were _dead_ , you fucking _moron_ ,” he said, not loudly but with vehemence. “You have to stop whatever creepy thing you’re trying to do. It’s not working. I’ve been watching you poison yourself for months, and it’s been bloody _horrific_. What the hell sort of rubbish concoction do you think you’re even making?”

 _I’m trying to do something_ **_good_ **, I thought. I shook my head. I hated how ashamed I was for making Harry feel this way, both because I knew he couldn’t control it and knew that his continued pain was both my fault and my failure. “I’m close to a breakthrough,” I hissed through gritted teeth, hesitant to open my mouth lest a torrent of emotion followed. 

“Oh yes, well and good then, onto your breakthrough from across the fucking veil, you absolute twat!” 

“Are we schoolchildren again?” I sneered. “Shall I call you Scarhead and throw a bludger at your face? Should I unbutton my shirt now, save it from getting sliced up on the second go-round?”

Harry very rarely became quiet when he was angry. But now he was, silent and scowling and brooding, trying valiantly to corral his more vicious inclinations. I wished I had been so restrained. 

He was silent for a very long time. I spent most of it ripping my cuticles once more. My fingertips were spotted with pinpricks of blood, and yet every time I tried to stop I started up again immediately. 

“Do you want to die?”

I wish his question had been angry.

I didn’t know if I could answer. I couldn’t even shake my head. I stared at my bloodied hands and willed the words to come out of my mouth, but they stalled in the back of my throat and stopped me from breathing. 

Harry’s gaze on me was Greek fire. 

_I should tell him_ , I thought.

 _I should tell him about me_.

But instead, a different confession spilled from my mouth. A deeper confession. One my soul had held onto, turned over, and been tortured by for all its incomprehension.

“Harry,” I said. “I don’t know how to _live_.”


	7. London Fog

“Can I buy you a...well, treat you to lunch perhaps?”

**~LONDON FOG~**

Harry has not left me alone since the incident, but he has been furiously corresponding with what appears to be a number of different individuals, if the varied disgruntled owls who appear at all hours of the day and night are any indication. I have never seen him put quill to parchment as often, even in school. 

When he is not glowering at his myriad letters he is sitting with me in the kitchen. It is too cold now for me to work on the farm, and all the canning and preserving has been done before--now there is only to wait out the dark winter, and to stoke the fire. 

I’m relieved that there’s no manual labor to be done: that way I will not have to acknowledge how profoundly I have set myself back. I have not returned to my laboratory in a week and a half. Lucky for me, I prepare everything in advance, so my clients are still satisfied. But that may not be the case if I don’t get myself together soon, and, more importantly, convince Harry that I will not drop dead the moment that doorknob turns. 

He has been trying not to make it obvious that he watches me. He has been trying not to hover. I am grateful for that. But I hate the new level of anxiety that I can feel wafting through the air around him, and I hate the guilt and shame that I feel because of it, simply another serrated edge in the twisting knife of my secrecy. 

I want to tell him. But I also very desperately do not want to tell him. Would I be presumptuous in doing so? Perhaps everything I have mistaken for affection is simple friendship or camaraderie formed from living together for so long. But I remember the looks he has given me when he believes I am not watching, and the way his hands sometimes linger. I remember the meals that he has made me and the small compliments that sound big simply because I have not received anyone’s admiration in so long. Maybe I’m so starved for attention that I am making mountains out of molehills, as they say. Maybe I am being arrogant in thinking that I am attractive enough of a prospect, even with whatever traces of Veela that may lie in cold-blooded wait in my genes. 

Perhaps he does not like me at all, with or without any traces of compulsion, and he is only here for his sense of duty and justice, because he is such a sickeningly good person. Right now, I do not see how he could. I have shown him just how profoundly flawed a partner I would make quite plainly. 

All of this self-doubt makes me righteous and angry and haughty, only because I know I should be the opposite. I begin to sneer at him for no reason, and must bite my tongue to cut off snide remarks. I judge him for taking care of me when I am vulnerable and I judge myself even more. I hate that I am like this and I am trying to know myself, and recognize my habits, and be better, but it is difficult and tiresome and I have never been as good a person as the Golden Boy. 

I had a tense moment with him today. 

I had a coffee for breakfast, and then, because it was bitingly cold outside and I needed to walk to the greenhouse, a shot of brandy. And then I had another because Harry refused his. And I liked the way my head had begun to float on my shoulders. 

Harry stilled my hand as I moved to pour my third shot. When I looked at him, he was biting his cheek in his mouth. 

I didn’t like that look in his eye. That worried look. It made me want to drink even more. 

I turned away and shrugged on my coat. “Don’t come to the greenhouse.”

“I’ll wait outside.”

“Don’t come.”

He was quiet, but he followed me anyway. 

I wish I was not the person that I am. I make everything monumentally more difficult for myself, and when things aren’t difficult, I am bored. 

I am proud but I hate myself, stubborn but I wish someone would help me. I wish I could ever allow someone to help me. It is lonely being me. I have been lonely and alone for so long. 

I think I may always be. I _fear_ I may always be. 

I need another drink.

I hold my head instead. 

_Why am I like this?_

“What is he doing here?”

Neville was in my kitchen. He was sitting at my kitchen table, and he was drinking tea with Harry. 

I’ve said before that he’s the only man in England that I trust, but I hadn’t seen him in years. We’d only really corresponded by owl, and maybe once or twice by firecall, since I departed. He is much taller than I imagined, and much more well-built as well. I knew he had grown into his face, but I would never have believed in childhood that _attractive_ would become an apt descriptor of Neville Longbottom. 

“Hi, Draco,” he said, standing to shake my hand. I gave him mine reluctantly. Was this some sort of intervention? I didn’t think I would be able to take it if so. My expression was souring by the second, I could feel it. 

“I had a question about your Snapdragons,” Neville told me. “How do you get them to stay energetic in cold climates? Warming spells would leave a residue and change the way they grow.”

Brow still furrowed, I reminded him, “I don’t use magic in my greenhouse. I bury water.”

“You bury water?”

“Barrels of it,” I said, nodding. “Four feet under the ground. Water retains heat better than soil. I make sure to put the Snapdragons nearby. How do you heat yours?”

“Plastic insulation,” Neville replied. “But I’d like to see your setup. Could we go to the greenhouse? How consistent is the heat as the winter passes?”

“Alright,” I said, and as I turned away and waved Neville on, I caught sight of Harry still at the table, wearing a very carefully neutral expression. 

“By the end of my first winter here, the process proved…”

~*~

I cannot write today. My mind can not withstand introspection. The roiling torrent of thoughts, the dark vortex of my experience threatens to consume me. But it will not. 

Another glass, perhaps, and then I shall be protected. My head feels better already. 

~*~

I sat myself in Hermione’s fireplace, determined not to talk to her fashion-challenged husband. I prayed fervently that none of her children appeared.

Alas, one of them did. A small girl with a head of hair as absurdly uncontrollable as Hermione’s when we were young walks into my view. Her face was splashed with freckles, although knowing Hermione’s genes I’m not sure how she ever took her nose out of a book-such as the one she carried then, moving by memory- long enough to see the sun. 

“Excuse me,” I said as she was about to sit on the couch. She started, clutching her book. “Would your mother be in?”

“She should be in a little while,” she replied. “She told me but I don’t remember what she said. Who are you?”

I hesitated. How does one introduce themselves to a child? I had never really been in that situation before, spending my adulthood in reclusion. “I’m Draco,” I replied. “And you must be Rosie?”

She nodded. “Do you want to hear about the book I’m reading?”

I sighed in relief. Hopefully she would natter on until her mother returned, allowing me to stay silent and not incriminate myself by saying something I shouldn’t have. “That sounds wonderful.”

Thirty minutes later and with my knowledge of turtles exponentially expanded, Hermione Granger returned to her domicile. 

“Mum!” Rosie yelled from her space in front of the fireplace as she heard the keys jingle in the front door. “Draco is calling!”

Hermione looked flushed and windswept from the icy outdoor cold, her flyaway curls bouncing around her head and her scarf falling from around her neck. She gave Rosie a distracted peck on the cheek and shooed her gently away. 

“She’s a delightful child,” I said honestly. I doubt I’ll ever decide to inflict something as horrible as life upon a poor unsuspecting child, but if I ever do, I hope they begin to turn out half as well as the Granger-Weasley brood is becoming. 

“Yes,” Hermione agreed, brushing a curl behind her ear and sticking it there quite firmly. Her look was a calculating question. 

“I’m sure Harry has been in touch with you?” I could see the hesitation on her face. “I’m not sure what he’s told you, and I don’t need to know specifics. I just want to be certain, and don’t want to bring it up with him- what is he working on?”

Hermione chewed her bottom lip in thought. “We’re working on appealing the stipulations of your protection agreement. We’re trying to amend it so that you can return to England.”

I hummed, nodding slowly. 

“Draco…” Hermione trailed off as my gaze snapped back to her. “Is this something you want?”

What did I want?

_What do I want?_

I held her gaze steadily, her brown eyes hard but concerned, flickering with the fire. 

_I just want to sleep._

My lips twitched. 

“I don’t know what I want anymore.”

~*~

London is busy. 

It is loud, and noisy, and bustling. There are too many lights. Too many people. People of all different shapes and colors, all running somewhere. 

I do not stand out. Harry does not stand out. We are specks of dirt in a dust storm. 

Trains whizz past, impossibly fast and loud. The wind of it blows my hair from my face. The crowd jostles myself and each other as we walk to the exits. 

“Floo would have been a bigger nightmare,” Harry had assured me. I am not so sure. 

The chaotic cavern that is King’s Cross is no better. I focus on Harry’s red jacket in front of me, terrified of losing him in the fray. 

Orion, confined to his carrier, dislikes it as much as I do. 

He stands off to the side and gently pulls me in by the arm. “We’re going to Grimmauld Place - the old Black house. Now that you’re back in England, we can apparate - would that be alright?”

“Side-Along me,” I demand. So many people. I am buzzing with adrenaline, and in attempting to steady my voice, it is curt. “Please.”

And it is done. 

Grimmauld Place feels comforting in its lack and stillness. The walls are grey. The rugs are dusty. The hallways are dim. The only noises are our footsteps on the floor and the creaking of the house. 

It is a welcome change in its familiarity from the glitter and hustle of King’s Cross. My mind finally feels as though it can settle, for the first time since stepping foot out my door, not knowing when I would be back. 

A hunched and deeply wrinkled elf appears with a jarring crack, wringing his hands in excitement and gushingly effusive. “Lord Malfoy of the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black! The true heir returns!”

“Could you put on some tea, Kreacher?” Harry asks. He is largely ignored. 

I interrupt the elf’s glittering compliments to repeat the same question. He bows so low his nose skims the floorboards, and disappears at once. 

Harry gives me an amused look. “You have a fan.”

“For once, someone in the world who prefers me to you,” I respond dryly, distracted by memories.

So many ghosts live in these walls, and none of them are real. My great-aunt, what a horrible woman, was the last inhabitant I knew. I would argue against visiting her with my mother and father as vehemently as I could, and it was never to any avail. I remember kicking my heels against that dining room chair. I remember mother and father sitting at that sofa. 

I remember them talking, haughty and polite. Every visit to my aunt was a step into a barren war zone. 

I remember them laughing. 

I shut my eyes tightly. 

“I need to have a moment alone,” I say. 

Harry’s face falls, but he nods. He tries to show me to my wing of the house, but is interrupted, once again, by his strange and croaking little house elf. 

_I just want to go to sleep._

Having Harry vy for me has its perks, but he has to stop. This isn’t fair to him. This isn’t fair to me.

Months, we’ve been living together before now. I don’t want to burden him anymore. 

Now he’s back in London, and although he goes out, I don’t. The lights and sounds sap my energy. I don’t want to meet people, old or new. I don’t want to smile and make nice in spaces where I do not belong, with people who would rather I was not there. 

The only place I know I am truly welcome is an empty doorway. 

He has a life here, and he’s returned to it. 

I must return to my own, lonely and meager as it has become. 

I told him on a rainy night, some days later. 

“I...Draco, you never had me under any sort of _thrall_. I didn’t need a reason from you to stay.”

“Then why?”

“I was already a bit...cynical about how things at the Ministry were being run, especially in the Auror force. It was so much kissing arse, and there were so many yes-men all around me. It was all so political, and I was in the center of it. None of it felt right, but I didn’t know what to do instead. I had worked my whole life to be an Auror. So I stayed. And it wasn’t until I saw you, saw what had happened and who they let slip through the cracks, that I realized how broken the system was.”

“So you stayed with me for a whole year because of administrative disgruntlement?”

Harry bit his lip and looked up at me sheepishly. “I may have been hiding a bit myself.”

I stayed quiet, so he elaborated. “I felt like I was letting everyone down. I was supposed to be Auror Extraordinaire, Department Head by the time I was thirty, and yet here I was, hating my job. Ron was there with me, but he didn’t see things like I did. He still saw the good in the work, but I couldn’t.” Harry sighed, scrubbing his hair. 

“After things fell apart with Ginny, I felt like a massive disappointment. I felt like I could never love anybody. Felt like nobody who mattered would love me back. And the Weasleys are my family, but...Ginny is their blood. Even if they would never say it, and even though Molly and Ron and Fred all assured me this wasn’t the case, it felt like sides were picked. It didn’t sit well.”

“So you came to me,” I concluded, “because I was a convenient hiding place and distraction.”

Harry grinned, breathing a laugh. “You always did know how to distract me. Maybe at first,” he began. “But I like you, Draco. A lot.”

“I’m broken,” I said flatly. 

“I don’t think people are ever broken,” he retorted. “Damaged, scarred, okay. I am. I know. But never broken.”

“Harry, I spent years hidden away in a tiny mountain village where nobody speaks English and I could hardly communicate. Hermione was the first person I had a proper conversation with basically since I left England. I was so lonely I latched onto you, and then punished myself because I figured you’d never actually want to spend time with me if your own violation. I was very nearly an alcoholic. I still might be, honestly, but now I have more distractions from it. And now that I’m away, all I wish for is to be back. Does that sound healthy or desirable to you?”

“You’re being too harsh on yourself. You got used to the village. It was a beautiful place, even if it was lonesome. It makes sense that London would be jarring.”

“Are we skimming over my other points, then?”

Harry huffed through his nose. “People are social creatures. The Ministry, to hell with the lot of ’em, handed you the second best thing to solitary confinement. Were your coping mechanisms healthy? No. Of course they bloody weren’t, I was damn out of my mind worried about you half the time. But that’s why you’re back here, can’t you see?”

This logic was some sort of magickery that didn’t make sense to me, and I told him so. “I’m back here because you wanted me to be back!” I blurted. “Not because I or anyone else chose me to be.”

“It will be better!” Harry retorted, his volume increasing. “Draco, I promise. It will be better. We have resources here.”

“I’m not a puzzle to be solved or a kitten to be saved,” I replied sourly. “You can’t fix me, Potter.”

“I’m not trying to,” he began, which I interrupted with a sharp laugh. 

“Oh, truly? What have the past few months been, then? You’ve been the only one around, and it’s been _too much._ It’s not fair to you. It’s not fair to _me_.”

“I want you to get help, but _fuck,_ Draco, I know it can’t be me and I don’t know what to do!” Harry tugged at his hair. “You asked me why you’re here—this is why! I know now is not the best time, but I know a woman—she works as a sort of mind healer.”

I shuddered. “I had enough of people rummaging around my head.”

“Not that kind of mind healer,” Harry said. “No Occlumency or anything necessary. It’s just talking. I think maybe it might help, but you have to be willing.” His eyes were pleading behind his spectacles.

My hackles were up and my voice was frigid. I could not stop the memories flooding back of the Dark Lord invading my mind, tugging at my psyche, prying me apart. Nothing was private. Everything had to be contained by the strictest of walls. “I am not willing.”

Harry sighed resignedly, helplessly. “I reckoned you’d say that, too.” He shook his head. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Watching him, I was quiet. Suddenly, my nose felt a bit stuffy. My eyes, much of their own accord, began to water. 

“I just…” I trailed off. 

I took a breath. It was shaky, despite me. “I just want to stop feeling like this.”

“I know,” he said. His soft tone, so different from only seconds before, spoke volumes more than any of his words. ”Oh, Draco. I know.”

  
  
  


My ticket was crumpled and damp in my sweaty hand. The wind of the platform was acrid and humid as it blew my hair from my face in bursts of arrivals and departures. 

“Do you really have to?” he asked me. 

Green eyes so vibrant, yet shadowed and lined. Eyes that had showed me so many looks of helpless disappointment I could not assuage, piercing even behind smeared spectacles. 

The whistles blew. The engine hummed. 

I could give him no answers, only actions. There was no room for words.

“Teddy will miss you,” he said. 

“I’ll be back for him,” I assured him. 

A pause, drawn out. 

A hand, light on my arm. The touch soft but wanting. Restrained from grasping, but just barely. 

“I will miss you,” he said, softer. 

I should not have given him my love. But right before I departed, I could not help my juvenile heart, still so needy and entitled. His words, so genuine, snuck through my armor better than any planned dinner, better than any strong proclamations. 

I had been there, to the place where he was. 

At the railroad tracks, as the stars shone overhead. 

“I’ll be back for you,” I promised. “If you’ll still have me.”

“Of course,” he said, though he was always the more optimistic of the two of us. 

I closed my mouth to the cynical words that were bent on tumbling forth and sealed my promise, as cliché and forlorn as it was, with a kiss. 

“Until we meet again,” I said, my gloved hand on his cheek. 

As history repeats itself, but our roles reversed. 

The whistles blew. 

The engines hummed. 

The wheels shrieked and turned. 

And I watched a solitary, dark figure, standing still and lonesome on the platform, he disappeared from sight.

I was always so afraid that he would leave me. I never believed that I might leave him.

Is this growth?

Merlin help me, I cannot be who I want to, with or without him.

I just hope I am making the right decision.


	8. Epilogue: A Beginning

He gave a smile. Sad but hopeful. Less haunted by the past for all the years away. 

Lighter, as he had always hoped. 

“You know, I would like that very much.” 


End file.
